A booking studio they own outright.
An events brand was about to buy its whole operation off the shelf — a $14,000 American platform with a $500-a-year subscriptionbolted on top, and all of its customer data living on someone else's servers. The studio built the alternative instead: a fully-owned, end-to-end system — an editorial brand, a five-step booking experience, payments, a client portal and an admin backend — running for the price of the hosting it sits on.
A $14K decision, before a single guest had posed.
A premium photo-experience brand was ready to launch. The plan on the table was the obvious one: buy a packaged booking-and-booth platform from a US vendor — $14,000 to get started, then $500 every year to keep using the services baked into their software.
It would have worked. It also would have meant renting the core of the business forever: the booking flow, the customer records, the galleries and the payment rails would all live inside a product owned by someone else, priced by someone else, and switched off at someone else's discretion.
The real brief wasn't “build a website.” It was a buy-versus-builddecision about who owns the operation — and the studio's answer was to build it, own it, and run it for the cost of a coffee a month.
“For a brand this premium, the booth is the show. The system behind it shouldn't be a subscription you can't turn off.”
The same business, two ownership models.
Toggle between the platform that was nearly bought and the system that replaced it. The features are comparable — what changes is who owns them.
$14,000 to start
A one-time licence to stand the business up on the vendor's product.
paid before launch$500 / year, indefinitely
An annual subscription for the services wired into their software — billing, galleries, hosting.
price set by the vendorLives on their servers
Inquiries, clients and galleries sit inside the vendor's account.
portability not guaranteedTheir template, lightly skinned
The booking flow looks like the vendor's product, not like Luma.
limited controlLocked in
Leaving means rebuilding from scratch and losing the history.
vendor holds the keysOne build, fully owned
The studio designed and built the platform — brand, booking, payments, portal, admin.
no licence fee~$14 / month hosting
The only recurring cost is the server it runs on — self-hosted on owned infrastructure.
no subscriptionIn Luma's own database
Every inquiry, client and gallery is theirs, exportable any time.
fully portableEditorial, end to end
A custom five-step booking experience that is the brand, not a skin over a template.
total controlTheirs to change
New packages, vibes and add-ons are edited from the admin — no developer, no vendor.
they hold the keysThe actual platform, front to back.
Five surfaces, one system: the public brand, the booking experience, the client-facing portal, and the admin where Luma runs all of it themselves.
The public brand
An editorial, premium-feeling site — “not just a photo booth, a brand moment.” Where the whole experience starts.
Build Your Experience
The five-step configurator — the differentiator. Event type, package, vibe, add-ons, details.
The client portal
A signed-in space for booked clients — details, files and their delivered gallery.
The admin backend
Events, galleries, reviews, packages, logs and subscribers — and a Builder Config where the booking flow itself is edited without code.
Booking as a guided, five-step experience.
Most photo-booth sites are a contact form and a PDF. Luma's is a curated flow that mirrors how a couple actually thinks about their night. Every selection writes straight to the database and Stripe the moment it's made — no form to re-key, no handoff to drop.
The occasion
Wedding · Brand Moment · Milestone · Something New
The experience
The Promise · The Signature · The Luxe · The Bespoke
The feel
Editorial · Warm & Golden · Bold & Vibrant · Custom Branded
The add-ons
Glam filters · scrapbook · audio guestbook · live gallery
The details
Date, venue and contact — straight into the inquiry queue
A platform, not a plugin.
Behind the editorial surface, the booking journey runs as one connected system. The moment a guest finishes the five steps, the selection is written to the database and a Stripe charge is raised — an inquiry becomes a booking, payment opens the portal, and the event flows through to a delivered gallery.
What the studio shipped.
Customer-facing
- An editorial brand identity and premium marketing site
- A five-step “Build Your Experience” flow, built natively into the site, writing each selection straight to the database & Stripe
- Four curated packages, with a live running total
- Four visual “vibes” that carry into prints and booth UI
- Stripe payments for deposits and balances
- A magic-link client portal with the delivered gallery
Behind the scenes
- An admin dashboard: events, galleries, reviews, subscribers
- A Builder Config to edit event types, vibes & add-ons without code
- Eleven Resend email templates across the full lifecycle
- A Postgres database as the single source of truth
- Activity logs and an inquiry queue
- Self-hosted on infrastructure the studio owns outright
Own the operation, not just the look.
The cheapest line item is the one you stop paying after launch.
The instinct, with a deadline and a launch ahead, is to buy the packaged platform and move on. The studio weighed it honestly — $14,000 up front and $500 a year is a real, recurring tax on a young business, and it buys a product you never actually own.
Building it instead took more work at the start and almost nothing after. The recurring cost dropped from a yearly subscription to the price of the hosting, and every off-the-shelf shortcut was measured against what it would cost in fees and control over the life of the business.
That's the throughline of the studio across every project: infrastructure you own, a brand that's truly yours, and no quiet dependence on someone else's platform — built once, owned for good.