Pixieset vs Pic-Time vs ShootProof: Pricing Compared

All prices are US dollars. One thing to note before you read the annual column: neither Pixieset nor Pic-Time publishes a yearly dollar total anywhere. Both publish only a monthly rate billed annually, so the annual totals in their rows are our arithmetic on that rate. ShootProof publishes real annual totals in its help centre, so its rows are quoted rather than calculated; the per-month annual figures in its rows are the ones printed on its public plans page.

One ShootProof tier is missing from that table on purpose. Its help centre documents an Advanced plan at 2000 GB of photo storage and 100 GB of video for $51.99 a month or $519.99 a year, and the public plans page does not show it. It is documented rather than on sale, so it does not belong in a table of what you can buy.

Read across the commission column first. ShootProof is 0% on every tier including Free. Pixieset is 0% on every paid tier and 15% on Free. Pic-Time is the only one of the three that keeps a percentage on paid plans, and the rate depends on who collects the money.

Pixieset's commission is 15% and it applies to the Free plan only. Every paid Client Gallery tier is 0%. That much is on the card. Two details are not.

First, the base. The help center states that "the commission fee is calculated based on the order subtotal, before any discounts, coupon codes, taxes, or shipping fees are applied." It then works the edge case for you: if a client's coupon brings the total to zero, "you will still be charged the commission fee because the fee is calculated based on the subtotal before discounts are applied." A free print promotion on the Free plan is not free to you. It costs 15% of the list price.

Second, the stacking. The commission "would be in addition to any processing fees charged by your third-party payment processor." Pixieset names the processors and their rates on the same page: 2.9% plus 0.30 $ and 3.49% plus 0.49 $ USD. Those come off the same order.

The other Pixieset cost is not a commission at all. Section 6 of the Terms, last updated 20 March 2026, reserves the right "to charge additional fees to users who go above the fair usage amount that is determined to be more than 20 GB per collection, and 100 GB of bandwidth per month." The same section says "Our client gallery plans are meant for individual photographer business use only" and directs multi-photographer studios to the separate Studio plans. Both of those sit above the Ultimate tier that is sold as unlimited storage.

Pic-Time is the only one of the three that takes a percentage on paid plans, and the rate depends on who runs the checkout. Its help center states that Pic-Time "offers commission-free store sales for all paid plans (with the exception of Beginner Client Delivery Suite plan and Art Store Professional plan)" when you collect payments yourself. When Pic-Time collects, the rate is 8% on Professional and 6% on Advanced. On Free and Beginner the commission "is always collected, regardless of store setup" at 15%.

So the 0% headline is conditional on two things at once: being above Beginner, and collecting payments yourself. If you want Pic-Time to handle the money, you are paying 6% or 8% on every sale for as long as you stay.

Pic-Time's unlimited tier carries the same fair-use pair as Pixieset's. Advanced storage "is designed for individual photographers' business only" and, verbatim, "if your usage exceeds the fair limits (more than 20GB per gallery and 100 GB of bandwidth per month), additional fees may apply." Two independent vendors publishing the identical pair of numbers is worth noticing: 20 GB per gallery and 100 GB of bandwidth a month is the practical shape of unlimited in this category.

The third Pic-Time cost is not billed in dollars, it is billed in files. Drop from Advanced to Professional and storage is "limited to 100GB only", with galleries above the cap "permanently deleted 45 days after the plan changes (oldest galleries first)". On the Free plan the window is shorter: storage starts at 10 GB and is reduced to 3 GB after 3 months, and "any galleries above that limit will be permanently deleted 1 week after the plan changes (oldest galleries first)". Pic-Time also states the result is not reversible: once purged for over a week, the high resolution photos cannot be restored.

Start with the part ShootProof gets right, because it is the most generous commission policy of the three and it deserves a plain statement. ShootProof states that it will "never take a commission" on your sales, and its plan matrix marks commission-free sales as included on all five tiers, Free among them. Neither of the other two matches it.

The fee that hides is archiving. ShootProof publishes it precisely: "Archiving costs a minimum monthly charge of $2.99 for up to 25 GB of storage. Once you exceed 25 GB, you will be charged $.05 per additional GB. Archiving is billed monthly for the previous month's usage." On every tier below Premium it is a separate line that grows with your back catalogue, and because it is billed a month in arrears, stopping it does not stop the next bill: "When you remove all galleries from archiving, you will still incur one more bill."

Premium is a partial exemption rather than a full one, and this is the part that changed on 23 September 2026. ShootProof states: "Photo archiving is included in our Premium plan. However, video archiving is not included in the Premium plan and will still incur a minimum cost $2.99 for up to 25 GB, with an additional $.05 per additional GB." The plan card says the same thing in fewer words, with "Photo archive included" and "Video archive starting at $2.99/mo" in the row headed "Securely store extra photos". Every tier below Premium reads "Archive for a fee".

Archiving is also not a hosting substitute. ShootProof states that an archived gallery "will become static" and that "archived galleries are not live for client viewing." Freeing space by archiving takes those galleries off the client-facing side of your business. Unarchiving is free, but conditional on room in the plan: "To unarchive a gallery, you'll need to be sure you have enough GB space available in your plan."

Archiving is not the only add-on either. Besides the plan charge, ShootProof names card processing at checkout, the Booking add-on and Music plans. Online booking is listed on the plans page at 4.99 $ a month, available on every tier including Free, and it is not bundled anywhere.

Here is the arithmetic at a stated volume. Change the assumptions and redo it. Every derived number below is arithmetic on the published rates in the table above.

The profile. 25 weddings a year. 800 delivered photos per wedding, so 20,000 photos a year, one gallery per wedding.

The assumptions. Delivered JPEGs average 8 MB each; that is an assumption, not a published figure, and it is the number most likely to differ for you. At 8 MB, one wedding is 6.4 GB and a year is 160 GB. Nothing is deleted in year one or year two. Prices are the annual rate. No sales tax.

Pixieset. Storage is the only meter and there is no photo cap. 160 GB is above Plus at 100 GB, so year one is Pro: 24 $ a month billed annually, 288 $ over twelve months as arithmetic on Pixieset's monthly figure. Year two ends at 320 GB, still inside Pro's 1 TB, so the price holds. Year three ends at 480 GB and still holds. Each 6.4 GB gallery is well under the 20 GB per collection fair-use line, but 25 wedding galleries being downloaded by couples and families is where the 100 GB of bandwidth per month becomes the live question.

Pic-Time. Same storage logic, one step more expensive because Professional stops at 100 GB and the next tier is unlimited. 42 $ a month billed annually is 504 $ over twelve months as arithmetic on Pic-Time's monthly figure. It holds in year two and beyond, subject to the same 20 GB per gallery and 100 GB of bandwidth fair-use pair.

ShootProof is not in that table, and the reason is worth stating. Until 23 September 2026 it metered the number of photos you kept online, and at this volume that meter ran out in year two and forced either a jump to the top plan or an archiving bill. It does not do that any more. Professional holds 1000 GB of photos at the published 319.99 $ a year, which absorbs 160 GB a year for long enough that a five-year projection stops being the interesting question. The squeeze this table used to show on ShootProof is gone, so the table no longer shows it.

Subscriptions are only half the bill for a studio that sells prints. Take 4,000 $ of print revenue in a year and run it through each commission policy. These are our percentages applied to a stated revenue figure, so they are arithmetic on the published rates, not published figures.

Two readings come out of that table. On a free tier, Pixieset and Pic-Time both take 600 $ out of 4,000 $ of prints, which is more than any paid subscription in this comparison costs. And on Pic-Time's paid tiers the 240 $ or 320 $ is the price of convenience, avoidable only by collecting payments yourself.

clientgallery.io has one plan: 10 $ a month, or 110 $ a year. No storage tiers, no print store, no commissions, no per-gallery fees. Galleries and clients are unlimited, and a paid account holds up to 500,000 photos, on the studio's own subdomain, with no platform branding on any client-facing page. Face Search and a two-way Lightroom Classic plugin are included.

Fair use in figures, so it is comparable rather than asserted. Uploaded photos are browser-compressed, web-sized proof JPEGs, hosted for as long as the account exists. The ceilings are 1,000 photos per gallery and 500,000 photos per paid account, which is hundreds of thousands of photos; free accounts hold one gallery of up to 1,000 photos. Full-resolution delivery is on every plan, free included: you upload a full-resolution ZIP per gallery, it stays live for 3 days per handoff and can be re-uploaded any time, with 100 GB of ZIP uploads a month per account.

Run the same 25 weddings through it. 20,000 web-sized proofs a year sit well under the 500,000-photo account ceiling, and 800 photos per gallery sits under the 1,000 photo ceiling. Each wedding's full-resolution ZIP is 6.4 GB on the same 8 MB assumption, live for 3 days per handoff, against 100 GB of ZIP uploads a month. Year one is 110 $, year two is 110 $, and year ten is 110 $, because the number that moves the other three platforms up their ladders is a number this plan does not meter.

The reason the price can be flat is a real limitation, and it belongs in the comparison: clientgallery.io hosts JPEGs. It does not warehouse RAW files or master video. If RAW delivery or in-gallery video is part of your service, you need Pixieset Pro or Ultimate, or Pic-Time Professional or Advanced.

This page is arithmetic, not a verdict on quality, and the arithmetic favours us on one axis only. Three things are true and go the other way.

ShootProof's zero commission on every tier including Free is the most generous commission policy in this set. Nobody else charges nothing on a free plan. If print sales are how you make money and you want to start without a subscription, that policy is worth more than the archiving line costs.

Pixieset's suite is the broadest of the three by a distance: the client gallery sits alongside a website builder, a store, a photo editor and email campaigns, all on one account with one bill. clientgallery.io is one product and does not attempt any of that.

Pic-Time's Lightroom integration on Professional and Advanced does more than ours. It imports project structure, batch renames, and syncs client selections. Our plugin publishes proofs from the catalog and pulls client picks back in as ratings, flags and colour labels, which is a narrower job done in both directions.

And the plain version: a studio that sells prints should not buy clientgallery.io. We have no print store at all, so there is nothing to sell through and no commission to save. If your revenue runs through a print lab and a gallery storefront, stay on Pixieset or Pic-Time and treat this page as pricing research rather than a pitch.

For a print-sales-led studio: Pixieset, on a paid tier. 0% commission from Basic upward at 8 $ a month billed annually, the broadest surrounding suite, and no condition attached to the zero. Pic-Time only matches that zero if you collect payments yourself; if you want the platform to handle checkout, Pixieset keeps 240 $ to 320 $ more of a 4,000 $ print year in your pocket than Pic-Time does.

For a high-volume delivery-only studio: Pixieset Ultimate. Of the three unlimited-photo tiers it is the cheapest at 40 $ a month billed annually, against Pic-Time Advanced at 42 $ and ShootProof Premium at 50 $. All three carry conditions: Pixieset and Pic-Time both reserve fees above 20 GB per gallery and 100 GB of bandwidth a month, and Pixieset caps RAW at 1,000 GB.

For a studio that wants no commission and does not mind archiving: ShootProof. Zero on every tier including Free, and published annual totals rather than a monthly rate you have to multiply. Budget the archiving line at 2.99 $ for 25 GB plus 0.05 $ per additional GB, watch the gigabytes rather than a photo count, and accept that archived galleries stop being live for clients. If you deliver video as well as stills, note that Premium is the only tier where photo archiving is included, and video archiving is charged there too.

Who clientgallery.io is for. A studio that delivers finished JPEG galleries, gets paid by invoice rather than through a gallery storefront, and does not want the bill to move when the back catalogue grows. One plan at 10 $ a month or 110 $ a year, your own subdomain, no platform branding, and a Pixieset import that reads a whole account from the Pixieset dashboard with one bookmark and reproduces the galleries under your brand. If you sell prints, buy one of the three above instead.

Pixieset and Pic-Time pages fetched 4 September 2026. Every ShootProof page fetched 23 September 2026, with each help-centre article carrying the date ShootProof last updated it. Prices are the US dollar figures as published; nothing on this page is converted between currencies. Figures marked arithmetic are our multiplication of a published rate, not a vendor-published total.

• Pixieset pricing (five tiers, storage, monthly and annual rates, commission, RAW, video), fetched 4 September 2026, https://pixieset.com/pricing/
• How does the 0% commission fee work (0% on Basic, Plus, Pro and Ultimate, 15% on Free), fetched 4 September 2026, https://help.pixieset.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002975072-How-does-the-0-commission-fee-work
• What is the cost of goods sold application fee (commission on the pre-discount subtotal, coupon-to-zero still charged, stacked on processor fees at 2.9% plus 0.30 $ and 3.49% plus 0.49 $), fetched 4 September 2026, https://help.pixieset.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003793352-What-is-the-cost-of-goods-sold-application-fee
• Pixieset Terms of Service, section 6 (fair usage: 20 GB per collection, 100 GB of bandwidth per month, individual photographer business use only), last updated 20 March 2026, fetched 4 September 2026, https://pixieset.com/terms/
• Uploading to Client Gallery (no photo cap, all uploads count toward storage), fetched 4 September 2026, https://help.pixieset.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003740132-Uploading-to-Client-Gallery
• Managing your Pixieset subscription (yearly plans offer up to a 20% discount compared to the monthly rate), fetched 4 September 2026, https://help.pixieset.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003816812-Managing-your-Pixieset-subscription
• Pic-Time Client Delivery Suite pricing (four tiers, monthly and annual rates, photo and video storage, feature matrix), fetched 4 September 2026, https://www.pic-time.com/pricing/client-delivery-suite
• Pic-Time commission rates by plan (15% on Free and Beginner always, 8% on Professional, 6% on Advanced, 0% when you collect above Beginner), fetched 4 September 2026, https://help.pic-time.com/en/articles/7901454-what-are-the-commission-rates-for-various-subscription-plans
• Why has my free plan storage been reduced to 3GB (10 GB reduced to 3 GB after 3 months, one-week permanent deletion, no restore), fetched 4 September 2026, https://help.pic-time.com/en/articles/9210592-why-has-my-free-plan-storage-been-reduced-to-3gb
• How do I downgrade my plan (100 GB limit and 45-day permanent deletion, oldest galleries first), fetched 4 September 2026, https://help.pic-time.com/en/articles/7905681-how-do-i-downgrade-my-plan-and-how-will-my-account-be-affected
• Pic-Time unlimited storage accounts (individual photographers only, fair limits of more than 20GB per gallery and 100 GB of bandwidth per month), fetched 4 September 2026, https://help.pic-time.com/en/articles/12002681-unlimited-storage-accounts
• ShootProof plans (the five public tiers and their GB allowances, the per-month annual rates, the feature matrix row "Securely store extra photos" reading "Archive for a fee" on Free, Starter, Standard and Professional and "Photo archive included" plus "Video archive starting at $2.99/mo" on Premium, commission-free sales marked Included on every tier, online booking at 4.99 $ a month), fetched 23 September 2026, https://www.shootproof.com/plans/
• What does archiving cost ($2.99 minimum for up to 25 GB, $.05 per additional GB, billed in arrears, one final bill after removal, photo archiving included on Premium and video archiving charged there), article updated 22 September 2026, fetched 23 September 2026, https://help.shootproof.com/hc/en-us/articles/115008322408-What-does-archiving-cost
• How do I archive my galleries and remove them from Archiving later (archived galleries become static and are not live for client viewing; unarchiving is free but needs enough GB space in the plan), article updated 21 September 2026, fetched 23 September 2026, https://help.shootproof.com/hc/en-us/articles/115008322448-How-do-I-archive-my-galleries-and-remove-them-from-Archiving-later
• ShootProof FAQs (ShootProof will never take a commission, on every plan), article updated 22 September 2026, fetched 23 September 2026, https://help.shootproof.com/hc/en-us/articles/360062280593-ShootProof-FAQs
• Are there any other fees (the four named charges besides the plan: archiving, card processing, Booking and Music plans), article updated 21 September 2026, fetched 23 September 2026, https://help.shootproof.com/hc/en-us/articles/115008032267-Are-there-any-other-fees
• How do your plans work (plans are billed monthly or yearly and are determined by the amount of GB storage needed; the annual totals of 99.99 $, 199.99 $, 319.99 $ and 600 $, and the Advanced plan at 2000 GB and 100 GB of video for 51.99 $ or 519.99 $ that the public plans page does not show), article updated 22 September 2026, fetched 23 September 2026, https://help.shootproof.com/hc/en-us/articles/115008189128-How-do-your-plans-work
• clientgallery.io plan and fair use (10 $ a month or 110 $ a year, unlimited galleries and clients, up to 500,000 photos, 1,000 photos per gallery, 500,000 photos per paid account, one gallery of up to 1,000 photos on free, full-resolution ZIPs live 3 days per handoff with 100 GB a month, JPEG hosting, no print store), checked 4 September 2026, https://clientgallery.io/