Pricing
Per-Gallery Pricing vs a Subscription: What Photo Delivery Actually Costs
The per-gallery model has largely disappeared from this category. Here is the arithmetic anyway, the storage variable that decides it in practice, and the ladders as published today.
Updated September 2026
If you are weighing paying per gallery against paying a monthly fee, check first that the per-gallery option still exists. On the platforms photographers actually shortlist, it mostly does not.
PASS is the platform most associated with per-event pricing, and its pricing page today has no per-gallery and no per-event price on it at all. It sells five subscription tiers. The per-event extension figure that circulates in comparison posts belongs to Pass Classic, the platform PASS sunset on 30 June 2024, and appears on no live official page. Pixieset and ShootProof have never sold per gallery. So the honest version of this question is narrower than it looks: at what volume does any subscription beat paying per job, and what makes the subscription number move once you are on one.
Every competitor figure below is from an official page fetched on 4 September 2026 and listed in Sources. Anything computed is labelled as arithmetic on those published rates.
The finding: per-gallery pricing has mostly left this category
PASS publishes Starter, Basic, Standard, Unlimited and Platinum. Each is a recurring monthly or annual charge with a storage allowance. There is no line item for one event, one gallery or one wedding.
The reason the old number persists is that Pass Classic really did work that way, and affiliate roundups copied each other for years afterward. PASS itself draws the line by URL: a gallery link containing pass.us is Pass Classic, and a link containing passgallery.com is the current platform. Pass Classic was sunset on 30 June 2024, and PASS states that all Pass Classic galleries, migrated or not, are deleted on their expiration date. The ten-year hosting promise attached to that era survives only as a retrieval request to support. If a comparison quotes a per-event price for PASS, it is quoting a platform that no longer runs.
That leaves the real decision between paying per job to someone who still offers it, such as a file-transfer service billed per send, and paying a platform a flat recurring fee. The arithmetic below works for either.
The arithmetic, done openly
Per-event pricing wins at genuinely low volume, for one reason: you pay nothing in the months you do not shoot. A subscription bills in February whether or not February had a wedding.
Subscriptions win as soon as volume is regular, for the opposite reason: the per-event fee recurs with every job, and the subscription does not. Two galleries in a week cost twice as much on a per-event plan and nothing extra on a subscription.
The break-even is one division. Take the annual subscription price, divide by the per-event fee, and round up. That is the number of galleries a year at which the subscription starts costing less.
Because no major platform publishes a per-gallery price today, the three fees below are illustrative brackets, not any platform's published rate. Substitute whatever a per-job service actually quotes you.
| Galleries a year | At 15 $ a gallery | At 25 $ a gallery | At 35 $ a gallery | Flat 100 $ a year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2 | 30 $ | 50 $ | 70 $ | 100 $ |
| 4 | 60 $ | 100 $ | 140 $ | 100 $ |
| 7 | 105 $ | 175 $ | 245 $ | 100 $ |
| 10 | 150 $ | 250 $ | 350 $ | 100 $ |
| 20 | 300 $ | 500 $ | 700 $ | 100 $ |
| 40 | 600 $ | 1,000 $ | 1,400 $ | 100 $ |
Every cell in the three per-gallery columns is arithmetic: the fee multiplied by the gallery count. The last column is clientgallery.io's published annual price.
Now the same division against the published entry rungs. Annual figures marked as arithmetic are the published monthly rate multiplied by twelve, because Pixieset publishes no yearly dollar total. Counts are rounded up to a whole gallery.
| Plan and annual figure | Break-even at 15 $ | At 25 $ | At 35 $ |
|---|---|---|---|
| PASS Basic, 72 $ published | 5 galleries | 3 | 3 |
| Pixieset Basic, 96 $ arithmetic | 7 galleries | 4 | 3 |
| ShootProof Starter, 99.99 $ published | 7 galleries | 4 | 3 |
| clientgallery.io, 100 $ published | 7 galleries | 4 | 3 |
| Pixieset Plus, 192 $ arithmetic | 13 galleries | 8 | 6 |
| ShootProof Standard, 199.99 $ published | 14 galleries | 8 | 6 |
| PASS Standard, 240 $ published | 16 galleries | 10 | 7 |
| PASS Unlimited, 456 $ published | 31 galleries | 19 | 14 |
Read the table as a rule of thumb. Around three to seven galleries a year, entry subscriptions and per-job fees cost about the same. Above that, per-job billing loses and keeps losing, because it scales with your work while the subscription does not.
The variable the roundups skip: storage is a stock, not a flow
The break-even table is where most comparisons stop, and it is where they go wrong. It treats the subscription as a fixed line. It is not. On every platform in this category except a flat one, the subscription is a storage meter, and storage does not reset in January.
A per-event fee ends when the event ends. You paid for that wedding, the money is spent, and the wedding never bills you again. A storage meter keeps counting every gallery you have ever delivered, for as long as it is online. Year three is not charged at year-three volume. It is charged at the sum of years one, two and three.
Pixieset states the mechanism plainly: all uploads count toward your account's available storage, and the remedy offered is to delete collections, photos or videos to free up space, or upgrade. Deletion there is permanent and cannot be undone. ShootProof's photo count is defined the same way, as the total number of photos you can have online in your account at any given time. PASS is blunter about what happens at the ceiling, and this is worth reading twice, because it is the real cost of a metered plan: "When your account exceeds its storage limit, two things happen: All new uploads are blocked. After 30 days, galleries will be deleted (oldest first) until your account is within its storage limit." On a downgrade, that window shortens to one week.
Here is what the stock does over five years. Assume 25 delivered galleries a year at 4 GB each, so 100 GB added annually. The gallery count and the gigabytes per gallery are assumptions; every price is published, and every yearly total is arithmetic on those published rates. The ShootProof column uses the GB-based structure that takes effect on 23 September 2026, at prices ShootProof states are not changing.
| Year | Stored total | Pixieset tier and year cost | ShootProof tier and year cost | PASS tier and year cost | clientgallery.io |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 100 GB | Plus, 100 GB, 192 $ | Standard, 100 GB, 199.99 $ | Standard, 100 GB, 240 $ | 100 $ |
| 2 | 200 GB | Pro, 1 TB, 288 $ | Professional, 1000 GB, 319.99 $ | Unlimited, 456 $ | 100 $ |
| 3 | 300 GB | Pro, 288 $ | Professional, 319.99 $ | Unlimited, 456 $ | 100 $ |
| 4 | 400 GB | Pro, 288 $ | Professional, 319.99 $ | Unlimited, 456 $ | 100 $ |
| 5 | 500 GB | Pro, 288 $ | Professional, 319.99 $ | Unlimited, 456 $ | 100 $ |
| Five years | 1,344 $ | 1,479.95 $ | 2,064 $ | 500 $ |
Now put the per-event line beside it. Twenty-five galleries a year at 25 $ each is 625 $ every year and 3,125 $ over five, and that line never moves. It does not compound with the back catalogue, because there is no back catalogue to pay for. It is simply high, at this volume.
That is the honest shape of the trade. Per-event billing is flat and expensive. Metered subscriptions start cheap and climb with your archive. The only line that is both flat and cheap is one that does not meter storage at all, and the price of that is what it will hold, which the next section states.
The published ladders
PASS, in US dollars. The annual column is what PASS prints as a per-month rate when billed annually, and its yearly total where one is published. PASS advertises a 1 $ first month on Basic, Standard and Unlimited. Platinum carries an eligibility check and no published annual figure.
| Plan | Annual, per month | Annual total | Monthly | Storage | Commission |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | 1 $ | not published | 8 $ | 10 GB | 15%, PASS branding stays |
| Basic | 6 $ | 72 $ | 8 $ | 20 GB | 15% |
| Standard | 20 $ | 240 $ | 24 $ | 100 GB | 0% store commission, 3% when PASS handles payment |
| Unlimited | 38 $ | 456 $ | 44 $ | Unlimited | 0%, the 3% payment fee applies |
| Platinum | not published | not published | 125 $ | Unlimited | 0%, eligibility check |
One caution on that commission column. PASS's own pages disagree with each other. The pricing page prints 15% on the two entry tiers, 0% store commission on Standard and above, and "There will be a 3% card processing fee charged when using Pass as the seller", which PASS states is the default option. A knowledge-base article about downgrading instead mentions 6% rising to 8% on Pass+ Collections. Nothing on either page reconciles the two. The pricing page figures are the ones quoted here, and the discrepancy is worth resolving with PASS before you sell anything through it.
Pixieset, in US dollars. Pixieset publishes annual billing only as a monthly rate billed annually, and states that yearly plans offer up to a 20% discount compared to the monthly rate. No yearly dollar total appears anywhere on its pages, so the twelve-month column below is our arithmetic on the published monthly figure.
| Plan | Annual, per month | Twelve months, arithmetic | Monthly | Storage | Store commission |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | 0 $ | 0 $ | 0 $ | 3 GB | 15% |
| Basic | 8 $ | 96 $ | 10 $ | 10 GB | 0% |
| Plus | 16 $ | 192 $ | 20 $ | 100 GB | 0% |
| Pro | 24 $ | 288 $ | 30 $ | 1 TB | 0% |
| Ultimate | 40 $ | 480 $ | 50 $ | Unlimited | 0% |
Pixieset's unlimited tier has a ceiling written elsewhere. Section 6 of its Terms, last updated 20 March 2026, reserves the right to charge additional fees above a fair usage amount "determined to be to be more than 20 GB per collection, and 100 GB of bandwidth per month". That is a per-collection cap and a monthly bandwidth cap sitting behind the word unlimited. The full tier-by-tier walkthrough is in our guide on what Pixieset actually costs per month.
ShootProof, in US dollars, and this one has a date on it. ShootProof states that its plans transition from photo-count-based storage to GB-based storage on 23 September 2026, which is 19 days from the date on this page, and that its plan prices are not changing. Both structures are below because a comparison written this month has to show both.
| Plan today | Photo cap | Plan from 23 September 2026 | Storage from 23 September 2026 | Monthly | Annual |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | 100 photos | Free | 3 GB, photos only | 0 $ | 0 $ |
| 1,500 | 1,500 photos | Starter | 20 GB photo and video | 9.99 $ | 99.99 $ |
| 5,000 | 5,000 photos | Standard | 100 GB photo and video | 19.99 $ | 199.99 $ |
| 25,000 | 25,000 photos | Professional | 1000 GB, 50 GB video | 31.99 $ | 319.99 $ |
| 50,000 and 100,000 | as named | Advanced | 2000 GB, 100 GB video | 51.99 $ | 519.99 $ |
| Unlimited | Unlimited | Premium | Unlimited photo, 150 GB video | 60 $ | 600 $ |
Two ShootProof rules belong in any cost model. If your account holds too much data for the equivalent new plan, ShootProof states you are automatically moved into the plan that has enough storage, with a one-year discount to your old price, and the remedy it offers is to archive photos to free up space. Archiving is a separate charge: a minimum monthly 2.99 $ for up to 25 GB, then 0.05 $ per additional gigabyte, billed monthly for the previous month's usage, and included on the Unlimited plan. An archived gallery is not a cheaper live gallery. ShootProof states archived galleries become static and are not live for client viewing. Every card also adds "Plus applicable taxes". Our ShootProof alternative page covers the rest of that structure.
Where a flat plan sits on the same curve
clientgallery.io is one plan: 10 $ a month, or 100 $ a year. There are no storage tiers, no per-gallery fees, no print store and no commissions, so there is nothing to model except the flat line. Galleries, photos and clients are unlimited under fair use, on your own subdomain, with no platform branding on any client-facing page.
Fair use, in figures, because a page arguing against storage caps owes you the numbers. Uploaded photos are browser-compressed proof JPEGs of about 0.6 MB each, hosted for as long as the account exists. The tripwires are 1,000 photos per gallery and 250 GB of proofs per paid account, which is hundreds of thousands of photos. A free account holds 5 GB and one gallery. Full-resolution delivery is a paid feature and works differently: 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 standing ZIPs per account.
Which is why the gigabyte column in the five-year table does not translate one to one. The same 25 galleries a year at 600 photos each is roughly 9 GB of proofs a year at 0.6 MB per photo, so about 45 GB after five years, inside the 250 GB ceiling. That is arithmetic, not a promise about your specific files.
The flat line also means the curve has no steps. On the break-even table above, 100 $ a year crosses per-job billing at the seventh gallery at 15 $ a gallery, the fourth at 25 $, and the third at 35 $. After that it stops moving, in year one and in year five, whatever the back catalogue weighs.
The trade is stated once and it is real: clientgallery.io hosts JPEGs. It does not warehouse RAW files or master video. That is what keeps the price flat, and it is a reason to pick something else if RAW or video hosting is part of your delivery.
When you should not pay us, or anyone
At genuinely low volume, do not buy any of this. Under about five galleries a year, the free tiers win outright, because they cost nothing and your break-even against a 100 $ annual plan sits at three to seven galleries depending on what a per-job service would charge you. Pixieset Free is 3 GB with 15% commission on store orders and Pixieset branding on the gallery. ShootProof Free is 100 photos today, becoming 3 GB of photo storage on 23 September 2026, with 0% commission. PASS Starter is 1 $ a month billed annually with 10 GB and PASS branding that cannot be removed on that tier. clientgallery.io has a free account too, at 5 GB and one gallery. A photographer delivering four small galleries a year should take a free tier and spend the 120 $ elsewhere.
One caveat inside that advice. PASS's free storage rule, announced effective 22 August 2023, is 10 GB for six months from signup and 2 GB after six months, and over the limit "Your galleries will begin being purged from your account until we reach the 2GB storage limit." A free tier that shrinks is not a free tier for a back catalogue.
And if you sell prints, stop comparing subscriptions. Price the commission instead. 15% of print revenue dwarfs the gap between any of these monthly figures. A studio doing 4,000 $ of print sales a year on a 15% tier pays 600 $ in commission, more than the most expensive annual plan in any table on this page, and Pixieset charges that 15% on the subtotal before discounts, coupons, taxes or shipping, stacked on top of the payment processor fees that Pixieset names at 2.9% plus 0.30 $ and 3.49% plus 0.49 $. Against that, ShootProof states it never charges a commission on your sales on any plan, and PASS drops store commission to 0% from Standard upward while charging 3% when it handles the payment. For a print-led studio the right question is which platform takes the smallest slice of the print, and the subscription is a rounding error. clientgallery.io is not in that comparison at all, because it has no store.
Same for a studio that lives inside a print lab and a CRM. If your bookings, contracts, invoices and lab orders all run through Pixieset or Pic-Time, the subscription is buying a business system, not gallery hosting, and moving to save 100 $ a year is a bad trade. Stay.
Sources
Every price, cap, policy and quotation above comes from these pages, all fetched 4 September 2026. Figures marked arithmetic are computed from those published rates and are identified as such where they appear.
- PASS pricing (five tiers, storage, commission rows, no per-gallery or per-event price), fetched 4 September 2026, https://www.passgallery.com/pricing
- PASS Classic migration FAQs (uploads blocked and 30-day oldest-first deletion over the limit, the pass.us and passgallery.com distinction, Pass Classic sunset on 30 June 2024), fetched 4 September 2026, https://servicehub.passgallery.com/pass-classic-migration-faqs
- PASS downgrading your plan and its effects (one-week deletion window on downgrade, branding and custom domain removed, the 6% and 8% figures that disagree with the pricing page), fetched 4 September 2026, https://servicehub.passgallery.com/downgrading-your-plan-and-its-effects
- PASS free plan update, effective 22 August 2023 (10 GB for six months, 2 GB after, galleries purged over the limit), fetched 4 September 2026, https://www.passgallery.com/blogs/free-plan-update
- PASS store settings and payments (the 3% card processing fee when PASS is the seller, and that this is the default), fetched 4 September 2026, https://www.passgallery.com/blogs/store-settings-payments
- Pixieset pricing (five tiers, monthly and annual rates, storage, commission), fetched 4 September 2026, https://pixieset.com/pricing/
- 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
- Uploading to Client Gallery (no photo cap, all uploads count toward available storage), fetched 4 September 2026, https://help.pixieset.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003740132-Uploading-to-Client-Gallery
- Checking your Client Gallery storage (delete collections, photos or videos to free up space, or upgrade), fetched 4 September 2026, https://website-help.pixieset.com/en/articles/7944254-checking-your-client-gallery-storage
- Deleting a photo, video or collection (deletion is permanent and cannot be undone), fetched 4 September 2026, https://help.pixieset.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001106771-Deleting-a-photo-video-or-collection
- Pixieset commission (0% on paid Client Gallery tiers, 15% on Free), fetched 4 September 2026, https://help.pixieset.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002975072-How-does-the-0-commission-fee-work
- Cost of goods sold application fee (15% on the subtotal before discounts, coupons, taxes or shipping, in addition to the payment processor fees Pixieset names 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, last updated 20 March 2026 (fair usage: more than 20 GB per collection and 100 GB of bandwidth per month), fetched 4 September 2026, https://pixieset.com/terms/
- ShootProof plans (five tiers today, photo caps, storage, plus applicable taxes), fetched 4 September 2026, https://www.shootproof.com/plans/
- ShootProof Photo Plan Change FAQ (transition to GB-based storage on 23 September 2026, prices not changing, automatic move to a plan with enough storage, annual totals), fetched 4 September 2026, https://help.shootproof.com/hc/en-us/articles/42846503437591-Photo-Plan-Change-FAQ
- How do your plans work (the photo count is the total number of photos online at any given time), fetched 4 September 2026, https://help.shootproof.com/hc/en-us/articles/115008189128-How-do-your-plans-work
- What does archiving cost (2.99 $ minimum monthly for up to 25 GB, 0.05 $ per additional GB, billed for the previous month, included on Unlimited), fetched 4 September 2026, https://help.shootproof.com/hc/en-us/articles/115008322408-What-does-archiving-cost
- How do I archive my photos (archived galleries become static and are not live for client viewing), fetched 4 September 2026, https://help.shootproof.com/hc/en-us/articles/115008322448-How-do-I-archive-my-photos-and-remove-them-from-Archiving-later
- What does ShootProof cost (ShootProof never charges a commission on your sales), fetched 4 September 2026, https://help.shootproof.com/hc/en-us/articles/115008032167-What-does-ShootProof-cost
- clientgallery.io plan and fair use (10 $/month or 100 $/year, unlimited galleries, photos and clients under fair use, JPEG hosting, no print store, free account at 5 GB and one gallery), checked 4 September 2026, https://clientgallery.io/
Frequently asked
Does PASS still charge per gallery or per event?
No. PASS's current pricing page lists five subscription tiers, Starter, Basic, Standard, Unlimited and Platinum, and carries no per-gallery or per-event price. The per-event extension fee that comparison posts still quote belongs to Pass Classic, which PASS sunset on 30 June 2024, and it appears on no live official PASS page.
At how many galleries a year does a subscription beat paying per gallery?
Divide the annual subscription by the per-job fee and round up. Against a 100 $ annual plan that is the seventh gallery at 15 $ a gallery, the fourth at 25 $, and the third at 35 $. Against PASS Standard at 240 $ a year it is 16, 10 and 7 galleries. Those counts are arithmetic on published annual rates.
Why does my subscription cost more in year three than in year one?
Because storage is a stock, not a flow. Pixieset states that all uploads count toward your account's available storage, and ShootProof defines its photo count as the total number of photos online at any given time. Year three is billed at the sum of years one, two and three, so a steady shooting rate still pushes you up the ladder.
What happens if I go over the storage limit?
PASS publishes the clearest rule: all new uploads are blocked, and after 30 days galleries are deleted oldest first until the account is back within its limit, shortened to one week after a downgrade. Pixieset says uploading stops and offers deletion or an upgrade, and deletion there is permanent. ShootProof offers archiving at 2.99 $ a month for 25 GB then 0.05 $ per additional GB, and archived galleries are not live for client viewing.
Is a free plan enough if I only shoot a few times a year?
Often yes, and you should take it. Under about five galleries a year the free tiers cost nothing and beat paying 100 $ or 120 $ for a year of anything. Watch the shrinking ones: PASS's free storage rule is 10 GB for six months from signup and 2 GB after, with galleries purged over the limit.
I sell prints. Which number should I be comparing?
The commission, not the subscription. At 15%, 4,000 $ of print sales costs 600 $ a year, more than any annual plan on this page, and Pixieset charges that 15% on the subtotal before discounts, coupons, taxes or shipping, on top of processor fees. ShootProof states it never charges a commission on any plan; PASS drops store commission to 0% from Standard up while charging 3% when it handles the payment.
How does a flat plan change the arithmetic?
It removes the storage variable. clientgallery.io is 10 $ a month or 100 $ a year with no tiers, no per-gallery fees and no commissions, and unlimited galleries, photos and clients under fair use: about 0.6 MB proof JPEGs, 1,000 photos per gallery, 250 GB of proofs per paid account, free accounts at 5 GB and one gallery. Full-resolution delivery is a ZIP per gallery, live 3 days per handoff and re-uploadable, with 100 GB of standing ZIPs. It hosts JPEGs and does not warehouse RAW or master video, which is what keeps the price flat.
Your client galleries, under your name
Unlimited galleries, your branding, one-click Pixieset import, and a Lightroom plugin, all on a flat 10 $/month with everything included. Your first gallery is free.
See the one flat plan