Pixieset Alternative Without a Print Store

Three claims circulate about Pixieset that are simply not true, and a page built on them would waste your time.

Pixieset is not expensive to un-brand. On the pricing page, removing Pixieset branding, connecting a custom domain and enabling full-resolution download are all listed under Basic, the first paid plan, at 8 $/month billed annually or 10 $/month monthly. Nobody is being held at 40 $/month to get their own name on a gallery.

Pixieset does not take a cut from paying customers. The help center is explicit: commission fees are only charged on orders placed while you are on the Client Gallery Free plan, and Pixieset does not charge commission fees on upgraded Client Gallery or Suite plans. Basic, Plus, Pro and Ultimate are all listed at 0%.

The 15% that does exist is a free-plan rule. It is calculated on the order subtotal, before any discounts, coupon codes, taxes or shipping fees are applied, and it sits on top of payment processing fees and, with automatic fulfillment, printing and shipping costs. That matters if you are selling on the free plan. It says nothing about a paid subscriber.

So the case for leaving is not that the store costs money. On a paid plan it does not. The case is that the store costs attention.

Selling prints from a gallery is not one switch. It is a small product you have to run. Somebody has to decide which lab fulfills, which products appear, what each size costs, what the markup is, whether shipping is included, whether digital downloads are sold alongside prints, whether there is a coupon, whether the coupon expires, and what the client sees first when the gallery opens.

A studio that sells prints does that work once and earns it back. A studio that delivers files does the same work, earns nothing back, and then owns the result. Every price list is a thing that can drift out of date. Every store setting is a thing to check before a gallery goes out. Every unconfigured storefront is a small risk that a client sees a default you never chose.

The cheapest version of a feature you will never use is the version that does not exist. That is the entire design decision behind clientgallery.io: no store, so no price lists, no lab, no fulfillment settings, no order emails, no commission policy, and no page in the product where any of that would live.

It is a real trade. It means clientgallery.io can never make you money from a print. It also means the gallery has exactly one job, and the settings screen only contains things that affect delivery.

This is a structural point, not a claim about anyone's interface. We have not measured Pixieset's client experience and will not describe screens we cannot cite, so look at it yourself before you decide.

The structure is this. A platform that sells prints has to give ordering a place to live. Any store needs an entry point in the client's view, a cart concept, and a path from looking at a photo to buying something. Those elements do not have to be loud, and a well-built store keeps them quiet, but they have to exist, and every one of them is a decision the platform makes on your behalf about what a client encounters between the photo and the download.

A delivery gallery has no such requirement. The client opens a link, looks, and takes the files. In clientgallery.io that is one button for the whole gallery or a click on any single image, on the studio's own subdomain, with no platform branding anywhere on a client-facing page. There is no second thing being asked of the client while they are looking at their photos.

For a commercial, corporate, editorial, real estate or event photographer whose revenue is invoiced, that is the whole preference in one sentence. The gallery is a handoff, and it should read like one.

Delivery-only does not mean payment-free. It means the platform is not in the transaction.

clientgallery.io lets the photographer paste their own payment link into a gallery. The client sees a Pay your invoice button next to the download, and it opens the photographer's own checkout. It is a per-gallery toggle, so a gallery that does not need it does not show it, and a PDF invoice can be attached alongside.

Because the money never touches clientgallery.io, there is no commission to quote, no percentage tier to climb out of, no payout schedule and no dispute queue. The photographer keeps whatever their own processor leaves them. That is the same net outcome a paid Pixieset plan gives on print sales, reached by removing the middle rather than by zeroing it out.

Pixieset figures as printed on its pricing page on 3 September 2026, with the currency switched to USD. The annual column is the per-month rate when billed for a year.

Read the table honestly. Basic already removes branding and already sells commission-free, so on price alone there is nothing dramatic between the first paid Pixieset plan and this one. What differs is that the Pixieset column is a ladder you climb as your delivered archive grows, and the last row has no row above it. Pixieset also does things the last row cannot: RAW upload arrives at Pro, and bulk share collections with it.

clientgallery.io is one plan at 10 $/month, or 100 $/year, which is 8.33 $/month. There are no storage tiers, no per-gallery fees and no commissions.

• Unlimited galleries, photos and clients under fair use. In figures: uploaded photos are browser-compressed proof JPEGs of about 0.6 MB each, hosted for as long as the account exists, with ceilings of 1,000 photos per gallery and 250 GB of proofs per paid account, which is hundreds of thousands of photos. Free accounts hold 5 GB.
• Full-resolution delivery as a paid handoff. You upload a full-resolution ZIP per gallery. It stays live 3 days per handoff and can be re-uploaded any time, with 100 GB of standing ZIPs per account. The proofs stay; the ZIP is the delivery event.
• No platform branding on any client-facing page, on the studio's own subdomain.
• One-click download of the whole gallery, or any single image. Hosted galleries never expire.
• Face Search, so a guest at a large event finds their own photos.
• Sub-galleries inside a gallery, for a shoot with several parts.
• A two-way Lightroom Classic plugin. Publish proofs from the catalog and pull the client's picks back in. Steps are on the Lightroom page.

The trade that keeps the price flat is the same one that keeps the store out: it hosts JPEGs, and does not warehouse RAW files or master video.

This is the part of the page that argues against itself, and it is not a formality.

If print and product sales are a line in your revenue rather than a hypothetical, stay on Pixieset. Its store is commission-free on every paid plan, it has labs behind it and automatic fulfillment, and clientgallery.io has none of that and never will. Nothing on this page is an argument for giving up a sales channel that works. A wedding or portrait studio whose albums, wall art and reprints matter is exactly who Pixieset is built for, and the 8 $/month Basic rate is not what would be holding you back.

Stay too if you simply never switched the store on. A Pixieset subscriber who ignores the storefront loses nothing by staying. The store does not bill you, it does not take a percentage, and an unused feature on a plan that otherwise fits is not a reason to move a whole archive. If Pixieset is working, the correct action is to keep using it.

Stay if you need RAW upload, which arrives at Pro. Stay if your clients live in Pixieset's mobile apps. Stay if you want one vendor across the studio, which is what the Suite plans are for. Pixieset also sells add-ons that are billed separately, so price the whole configuration you actually use before comparing anything.

Move only for the reason this page is about: you deliver files, you invoice separately, and you want a gallery whose only job is the handoff. Then a storefront is not a benefit you are declining, it is a surface you no longer maintain.

The migration is a whole-account flow, not a gallery-by-gallery chore. On the Pixieset dashboard the studio clicks one bookmark. It reads the account through the dashboard API the Pixieset web app already uses, and every collection is reproduced at full size under the studio's brand. Pixieset is only read, never changed, and no password reaches clientgallery.io. Re-running skips what is already imported, so a large archive can move in stages without duplicates. A single-gallery bookmark also exists for one-off cases. The steps are on the import page.

Sequence it the boring way: import, open a few galleries and check them, send clients the new links, then cancel Pixieset at the end of the period you have already paid for.

Pixieset blocks automated fetching, so its pages were read in a browser session on 3 September 2026 at the URLs below, with the pricing page currency switched to USD. Every number on this page traces to one of these entries.

• Pixieset pricing, Client Gallery plans (currency switched to USD), read 3 September 2026, https://pixieset.com/pricing/
• Pixieset help: How does the 0% commission fee work, read 3 September 2026, https://help.pixieset.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002975072-How-does-the-0-commission-fee-work
• clientgallery.io pricing and product, verified in the product the same day, read 3 September 2026, https://clientgallery.io/
• clientgallery.io import, the whole-account Pixieset flow, read 3 September 2026, https://clientgallery.io/import