ARTPOWER’s New Platform Helps Artists Build Financial Confidence
Designed to answer one of creative work's toughest questions: "What should I charge?"
Artists wear many hats: we’re creators, but we’re also entrepreneurs, project managers, strategists, and accountants. Often all at once. However, the financial tools available to us are rarely built to support the realities of our creative work: fluctuating income, project-based careers, multiple revenue streams, and the challenge of determining what our work is worth.
ARTPOWER is changing this with tortoise, an all-in-one financial platform built by artists to power artists’ financial and creative lives.
Developed over three years and informed by more than 1,000 artists, across the country, tortoise brings financial planning, education, and artist‑driven knowledge into one place. Its tools are built around how artists actually work — from flexible budgeting that adapts to irregular income to a free Rate Calculator that blends living‑wage data with an artist’s experience and aspirations. The goal: help artists answer a question that is both essential and often isolating — What should I charge?
Early tortoise data reflects what artists have been saying for years. Eighty‑three percent of artists on tortoise work across at least two practices, and nearly half of all rates generated through the Rate Calculator were voluntarily shared with the Artist Rate Database — a powerful signal that artists want more transparency, more shared knowledge, and more collective clarity around how creative labor is valued.
Artists are essential to a healthy society and contribute to the economy, and yet, we’ve normalized the idea that financial struggle is an inevitable condition of creative life,” says janera solomon, artist, founder, and CEO of ARTPOWER. “We want artists to feel confident talking about money and to have tools they can actually trust, so their creative and financial lives can feel more in tune and less in conflict.”
Tortoise is a central pillar of ARTPOWER’s ecosystem — a long‑term, field‑shaping infrastructure designed to expand artists’ financial self‑determination through integrated tools, resources, community, and shared knowledge.
Learn more and try the free Rate Calculator at artpower.io/tortoise.
