SmugMug Alternative Without Storage Tiers

SmugMug's plans page lists Direct at "$20.00 /MO billed annually", Portfolio at "$23.50 /MO billed annually", and Pro at "$37.00 /MO billed annually". There is a fourth plan, Enterprise, with no price displayed, described as "A white-glove, tailor-made plan".

Two things about those numbers deserve care, and most comparison pages get both wrong.

First, they are annual-commitment rates. The words "billed annually" sit on every one of them. They are monthly-equivalent figures available to someone who commits for a year, not month-to-month prices. Anywhere a SmugMug rate appears on this page, it is that kind of rate.

Second, the page displayed a bare dollar sign with no currency code and no country selector. We cannot tell you whether $20.00 is US or Canadian, so we are not going to assert one. The figures are printed here exactly as the page printed them.

We are also not publishing a SmugMug feature comparison by tier, and not publishing any commission percentage. SmugMug's help centre could not be reached on the date of this fetch, and the feature grid did not read the same way twice. Guessing at either would make this page less useful, not more.

SmugMug's plans page carries the headline "Unlimited storage, never delete another photo". A few lines away, the same page scopes it: "Unlimited full resolution JPEG storage".

Then it prices what falls outside that scope. RAW files are a separate paid add-on: "Store, organize, and protect up to 1TB of RAW files for just $10/mo, then $6/mo for each additional TB."

Read those three lines together and you have the most honest sentence available about storage pricing anywhere in this market. The word unlimited always has an edge. SmugMug is not hiding theirs. Their edge is a file format: JPEG is inside the promise, RAW is outside it and metered by the terabyte.

That is the whole argument of this page, and it is not a criticism of SmugMug. It is the opposite. A vendor who writes the scope next to the word is telling you the truth. The failure mode in this category is the vendor who writes unlimited with no scope at all, and then discovers a scope on the day your account crosses it.

So we print ours. Not in a terms page, on the marketing pages, in the same size type as the price.

clientgallery.io is one plan at $10 a month, or $100 a year, which works out to $8.33 a month. Unlimited galleries, photos and clients under fair use. Here is exactly what fair use means, alongside SmugMug as published on 11 September 2026.

250 GB at roughly 0.6 MB a proof is hundreds of thousands of photos. A working photographer does not reach it. We publish it anyway, because a number you can check is worth more than a word you have to trust.

Here is the structural cost of a ladder, separate from what any rung costs.

To pick a tier you have to predict your own year. How many weddings. How many commercial days. Whether the corporate client who filled last autumn renews. Whether you take on a second shooter. That forecast is a guess, and both directions of the guess cost you money.

Guess high and you pay for headroom you never touch. Guess low and the platform interrupts you, usually in the week you are busiest, because that is precisely when the ceiling arrives. A gallery that will not upload on a Sunday night is not a billing event. It is a client waiting.

There is a second cost that nobody prices. Tiers change the way you work. You start culling harder than the edit deserves. You delete old galleries a client might still want. You think about your storage bill while choosing frames. That is a bad place for a business decision to live.

A flat price removes the forecast entirely. There is no rung above ours to climb to, so there is nothing to predict and nothing to optimise. A slow quarter costs $10 a month. A record quarter costs $10 a month.

We can only do that because we chose a narrow job. We host proofs and we deliver finished files. We do not warehouse your masters. A platform that stores everything you have ever shot has to meter you, because your archive grows every year whether your revenue does or not. That is not a flaw in SmugMug's pricing. It is the honest consequence of the product they sell. We priced our way out of it by not selling that product. The longer version of this argument is in is there an unlimited client gallery for a flat price.

Everything below is in the $10, because there is nowhere else for it to be.

• Unlimited galleries, photos and clients under the fair-use figures printed above.
• No platform branding on any client-facing page, and the studio's own subdomain.
• Face Search, so a guest at a wedding or an event finds their own photos without scrolling a thousand frames.
• Sub-galleries inside a gallery, for splitting a day into ceremony, portraits and reception under one link.
• A two-way Lightroom Classic plugin. Publish proofs from the catalog, pull the client's picks back into it.
• One-click download of a whole gallery or any single image, for the client. Hosted galleries never expire.
• Whole-account Pixieset import, if that is where you are coming from. One bookmark on the Pixieset dashboard reproduces collections, sets, titles, event dates and photo order under your brand, and can be re-run in stages without duplicates.

Three clear cases. If any of them is you, stay, and do not let a price talk you out of it.

• You want a public website. SmugMug sells a hosted portfolio site with your work on it. We do not sell a website at all. We are a delivery and proofing tool that lives behind a link you send to one client.
• You sell prints or downloads through the platform. SmugMug's plans page is built around a storefront. We have no store, no checkout and no commissions, which means there is nothing here to move your sales into.
• You want your full-resolution JPEGs to live in the same product as your galleries. SmugMug states unlimited full resolution JPEG storage. That is genuinely more generous than our model, and if a gallery platform is also meant to be your archive, we are the wrong tool. If RAW needs to live there too, SmugMug prices that separately at the rates quoted above.

The case for switching is narrow and specific. Your month is shoot, upload, send a link, collect picks, deliver. You do not use a storefront. Your portfolio lives somewhere else already. What you want is for the delivery step to cost the same in December as it does in February. That is the only thing this page claims to do better. The wider field is laid out in client gallery alternatives.

Every SmugMug figure and quotation on this page was taken from the page below on 11 September 2026. Prices are reproduced as displayed, with a bare dollar sign and no currency code, and every advertised rate is marked "billed annually" on that page. SmugMug's help centre could not be reached on that date, so this page states no commission percentage, no revenue share, and no claim that a named feature requires a named tier.

• SmugMug Plans, fetched 11 September 2026, https://www.smugmug.com/plans
• clientgallery.io pricing and fair-use figures, verified in the product the same day, fetched 11 September 2026, https://clientgallery.io/