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I booked a Shoreditch daylight studio through Peerspace last spring. The studio's own website listed a full day at £650. My Peerspace booking came out at £828 before the guest processing fee hit. After that, I paid £912. So: £262 more than going direct. On a standard commercial day rate, that's most of an assistant's day gone in platform fees.

That experience made me actually read the fee structure properly, and now I know what to ask studios before committing to a platform booking.

How Peerspace charges hosts

Peerspace takes a 20% service fee from the host — from the studio owner — on every booking. So if a studio lists their space at £650 on Peerspace, they receive £520 after the platform takes its cut. Some studios absorb this and list the same price across all channels. Most don't, because that means they're taking a 20% margin hit on every Peerspace booking vs a direct enquiry.

The logical move for most studio owners is to list on Peerspace at a rate that, after the 20% fee, still clears their target revenue. A studio that wants £650 net lists at £812. Rounded to something that looks normal: £800 or £825. That's before you, the guest, see any fee at all.

The guest processing fee on top

Guests pay a processing fee on top of the listed price. Peerspace doesn't publish the exact percentage — it varies by booking size and other factors — but it typically runs between 10 and 20% of the booking subtotal. On a £800 listing, that's £80–£160 additional. So the total you pay as a guest is the inflated listing price plus the processing fee.

On that same Shoreditch booking: listed at £800 (inflated from £650 direct), plus a £112 guest processing fee. Total £912 against a £650 direct rate. The studio owner still pocketed roughly £640, close to their target. Peerspace collected around £272 in combined fees.

Worth noting: that's not fraud. It's disclosed, it's standard marketplace economics. But the markup is material enough that it changes the arithmetic on how you book.

When Peerspace still makes sense

I'm not arguing you should never use it. Discovery is genuinely useful — the platform surfaces studios you'd never find from a Google search, especially in cities outside London where studio aggregation is patchy. If you're shooting in Bristol or Leeds and need a 4m-ceiling daylight space, Peerspace or Giggster will likely show you options you wouldn't find otherwise.

It's also useful for one-off bookings where you don't have a studio relationship and you want the platform's booking protection and payment infrastructure. Paying through Peerspace gives you some dispute resolution coverage that a bank transfer to a studio you've never worked with doesn't.

But for regular London work — weekly shoots, ongoing product programmes, multi-day catalogue days — paying a 25–40% effective markup every time is expensive enough to actively build a direct studio contact book.

The maths on a typical production month

Say you're a creative agency doing six studio days a month in London. Average booking value: £700. Through Peerspace at a realistic combined fee load of 30%: you're effectively spending £910 per day, £5,460/month. Book direct with the same studios: £4,200/month. That £1,260 difference is a decent freelance day rate, a month of Adobe subscriptions, or — more practically — the difference between the job making money and not.

For one-off freelancers doing three studio days a year, the maths doesn't matter much. For production companies doing twelve to thirty days, it does.

How to find the direct rate

Most studios list their Peerspace presence alongside their own website. A quick search for the studio name directly will usually surface their own booking page. Many explicitly offer a lower direct rate if you ask — they'd rather you bypass the platform fee and they keep the full amount.

Some studios are exclusive to Peerspace or Giggster, especially newer spaces that don't want to manage bookings themselves. For those, the platform is your only option and the fee is unavoidable. But in my experience, most mid-size London studios with a cyc and a proper client list have their own booking system.

Giggster vs Peerspace: same problem, slightly different structure

Giggster charges hosts a commission on completed bookings — typically in the 10–25% range depending on booking type — plus a guest service fee. The mechanics are similar to Peerspace. Their platform has a different mix of spaces, with more location-style shoots (kitchens, living rooms, industrial warehouses) alongside dedicated photography studios.

Neither platform is dramatically better or worse on fees. The question is always the same: is this studio available direct, and does going direct save enough to be worth the extra admin?

The short version

Peerspace's 20% host fee typically means you're paying 25–40% more than the studio's direct day rate by the time guest fees are added. For one-off bookings in unfamiliar cities, that's a reasonable discovery premium. For regular repeat work in your home city, it adds up fast enough to justify building direct studio relationships instead.

If you want to find studios across the UK and compare direct-booking options in one place, creativestudiohire.com lists studios with contact details so you can enquire direct without the platform markup.

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