How a Financial Platform for Artists Uses Our Living Wage Data to Help Creatives Price Their Work

The challenge 

Most artists lack a reliable compensation framework for knowing what to charge for their work. Rate-setting for creatives has historically been a mix of peer benchmarking, gut feel, and client budgets—none of which account for what it actually costs to meet basic needs where they live and work. Artist-led tech startup ARTPOWER set out to change that by building tortoise, a financial platform with tools, resources, and support designed for artists. 

The tortoise app is centered around a concept called abundance—a vision of artist financial wellness that extends beyond the bare minimum to envelop emergency savings, wealth building, retirement planning, and investing back into creative practice across the lifecycle. But abundance has to start somewhere. And for ARTPOWER, that starting point is understanding, with precision, what the baseline actually is. 

The solution: ARTPOWER x Living Wage Institute 

That's where our living wage data comes in. ARTPOWER partnered with the Living Wage Institute to integrate our Wage Index database directly into the tortoise app’s Rate Calculator.  

Our living wage data serves as the empirical foundation that makes rate-setting in the tortoise app possible across every U.S. county. This granularity is critical not only to helping users identify a marker for financial stability but also adding meaningful rate variation across markets. An artist in Brooklyn, New York and an artist in rural Texas face fundamentally different cost pressures, and our data ensures the rates they see in tortoise reflect those differences at the county level.

Once that baseline is clear, the tortoise Rate Calculator helps artists and creatives build upward by factoring in experience, practice, and billable hours. These additional layers reflect the realities of independent creative work while balancing the broader financial goals that move the needle toward abundance.

The impact 

By anchoring artist rates to the cost of meeting basic needs, tortoise inverts the traditional logic: instead of rate-setting based on guesswork, artists price based on what they need for their creative practice and their lives. As a result, 1,000+ artists to date are better positioned to invest in their practice, participate in their local economies, and do the kind of sustained creative work that generates cultural and economic value in their communities over time.

While ARTPOWER integrated Wage Index to solve a pricing problem specific to artists, our other partners use the same data to build location-aware tools to power a variety of applications for their own industries. Interested in integrating our Wage Index database into your product or platform? Reach out to the Living Wage Institute team to learn more about our software integration solutions.