Shutterstock Review
This is the largest microstock in the world which is currently selling around 16.6 millions of royalty free images, with this figures increasing by 90-100 thousands weekly.
The major characteristic of this stock photo agency is that images and photos stored on Shutterstock are available using subscription only. Shutterstock, thus, mainly targets those customers, who buy a large number of images and photos on a regular basis.
The standard subscription plan, offered by Shutterstock, is "25-A-Day". It includes 25 royalty free photos or images that can be purchased daily throughout one month. Thus, a customer is able to buy 750 images per month for only $249 or $0.33 per image. There are special discounts for those who purchase three or more months subscription. And it can lower to $0.28 per image.
In addition to monthly subscription, Shutterstock offers yearly subscription called "On Demand" to those who rarely need to purchase images and photos. Having chosen this type of subscription, you will be able to purchase images and photos from Shutterstock any time while your subscription lasts.
In other words, the "On Demand" plan allows you to make purchases of individual items (or single purchase) at Shutterstock. However, the terms of "On Demand" are not as flexible as the terms offered by other stock photo agencies as single purchases.
As such, the price of one image or photograph, excluding vector files of vector images, on Shutterstock will amount to $9.16 (given the subscription price of $229) or $15.00 (given the minimum subscription price of $15). In order to take all advantages of vector images, you will have to purchase a subscription plan for $49 or $229 with a minimum image price of $9.80 and $9.16 respectively.
Evidently, Shutterstock does not suit you if you are interested in purchasing one image or photograph for $1. However, if you are planning to buy large numbers of royalty free images and photos on a regular basis, Shutterstock is the service you should seriously consider. An incredible variety of images and photos available on Shutterstock will meet the demand of the most sophisticated customers. And all of this — at a very low price.
To register on Shutterstock click this link.
Сomments
Shutterstock is the absolute bottom of the barrel. It’s the most arrogant stock site out there, which would be expected if it wasn’t also the worst stock site out there. I conducted an experiment after reading some negative comments about SS to see if it was worth my time to sign up: I uploaded 10 images. 4 were rejected for very vague reasons (they claim to make these reasons clear so that newcomers can learn from their mistakes, but no such luck). In addition, they make submitters wait an entire month before they can submit another 10 photos. This makes absolutely no sense and totally justifies all the negative things I’ve read about the site. So a month later, I submitted the exact same 10 photos. This time, 5 were rejected and 3 of the accepted ones had been rejected the first time! This proves that they have no set standards and whether you get accepted or not depends entirely on which reviewer you get and his/her mood on that day. Also, I have thousands of photos that I gave file names to for submission to other sites, and when I finally got accepted at ShutterStock and attempted my first batch upload, it failed due to a “critical upload error”. I looked for the problem in the forum and discovered that there can’t be any spaces in the file name or the transfer will fail. So I would have to rename thousands of files to upload them. All this trouble and you only make $0.25-$0.30 per photo. I posted my own comment in the forum about how ridiculous this was and that comment was deleted within ten minutes. This level of arrogance is unheard of and it’s no suprise that they steadily continue to drop in the rankings each month. Trust me, folks, don’t waste your time.
