Virtual tour pricing is difficult to compare because providers quote different things. A photographer quotes a call-out. Matterport quotes a monthly subscription that does not include capture. A camera vendor quotes hardware and says nothing about the hours it takes to use it. The only number that compares like with like is cost per listing, all in.
The three layers
Every option is some combination of the same three costs.
- Capture. Getting the property recorded. A photographer’s time, or a staff member’s time plus a camera.
- Processing. Turning the capture into a tour. Usually included, but it is what determines turnaround.
- Hosting. Keeping the tour live. This is the one that quietly accumulates, because it is charged per tour per month on several platforms and does not stop when the property sells.
Option 1: a local virtual tour photographer
UK providers commonly quote from around £250 to £350 for a typical property, with larger homes costing more. That figure usually covers capture, processing and a period of hosting.
Cost per listing: roughly £250 to £400.
What it is good for: a small number of high-value instructions where the marketing budget justifies it, and where a professional eye genuinely adds something.
Where it breaks down: volume, and speed. Scheduling a third party into the gap between instruction and going live is the constraint, not the invoice. An agent who wants every listing toured cannot usually book a photographer for every listing.
Option 2: Matterport
Matterport is the recognised name and the most commonly cited benchmark, but its pricing has three separate layers and the headline subscription figure is only one of them.
- Subscription. Tiers run from a free single-space plan up through roughly $10 per month for a handful of spaces, around $69 per month at the professional tier, and several hundred per month at business and enterprise levels.
- Hosting. Active spaces carry an ongoing per-space cost, in the region of $20 per month each. Tours stop being hosted if payment stops.
- Capture. Not included. Either buy a camera and spend staff hours, or hire a Matterport photographer, which returns to option 1 pricing.
Cost per listing: highly variable. UK guidance generally suggests that outsourcing capture is more economical than buying hardware unless shooting at genuinely high volume.
The layer that surprises people: hosting. A tour for a property that sold eighteen months ago is still costing money if the space is still active, and an agency that has run Matterport for a couple of years is usually paying for a back catalogue nobody looks at.
A fuller comparison of the alternatives is here.
Option 3: buying a 360 camera
A consumer 360 camera is a few hundred pounds. That number is real but it is the smallest part of the cost.
The rest of it:
- A tripod, because handheld 360 capture shows the operator and wobbles.
- Staff time per property. Multiple positions per room, moving the tripod, checking each shot.
- Software to host and link the panoramas into a navigable tour.
- Training, and the fact that quality varies by whoever is holding it that week.
Cost per listing: the hardware amortises quickly across volume, so after the first several properties the dominant cost is staff time. At an hour per property including travel, that is the real number to compare.
Option 4: generating a tour from photos already taken
The newest option removes the capture layer rather than reducing it. Photographs for the listing are taken anyway, so a tour built from those photographs adds no visit, no equipment and no scheduling.
Spatia charges per tour rather than per month, and current pricing is on the pricing page. Pay as you go is £99 for a tour; on the plans that include several tours a month the effective cost lands nearer £62 to £75 per listing. Against £250 to £400 for a booked capture that is roughly a third to a quarter of the cost, and hosting is included rather than metered separately, which removes the back catalogue problem described above entirely.
Where it is genuinely different: not only the price, the schedule. A tour built from existing photographs can be live the same day the listing is, because nothing has to be booked. That is what turns a tour from something a handful of instructions get into something all of them get, and coverage across the book is usually worth more than polish on a few.
The honest limitation: output quality is bounded by the photographs that went in. A room photographed once from the doorway supports a narrower view than a room photographed from several angles. Spatia handles this by clipping the view to the arc the photos actually cover rather than inventing the rest, which is the right trade-off but does mean photo coverage matters.
Comparing properly
Work out cost per listing at the volume actually being listed, and include staff time at a real hourly rate. Three questions usually settle it.
- How many listings per month? Low volume favours a photographer. High volume favours anything that does not require a visit.
- How fast does it need to be live? If tours only get made when somebody remembers to book one, in practice most listings will not have one.
- What happens to old tours? Per-space monthly hosting turns a one-time marketing cost into a permanent line item.
On the two numbers that decide it at volume, cost per listing and whether anybody has to travel, generating from existing photographs wins on both, and the honest price of that is a dependence on photo coverage rather than on a camera. For an agency listing more than a handful of properties a month, that is usually the trade worth making. What actually caps throughput is covered here.
Prices quoted here were current in August 2026 and are drawn from published provider pricing and UK market guides. Treat them as a starting point for quotes rather than as fixed figures, and note that dollar-denominated tiers move with the exchange rate.