Does Pixieset Take Commission on Digital Downloads?

Pixieset publishes one commission rate per plan. Only one of them is not zero.

If you are on any paid Pixieset plan, the commission question does not apply to you at all. People often arrive at this page believing Pixieset takes a cut from paying subscribers. It does not. The 15% is a free-tier rule.

The rule is written about orders and their subtotal, with no carve-out for digital items. A digital download sold through the gallery store is an order like a print order, so on the free plan it carries the same 15%.

What differs is everything stacked underneath. Pixieset's article notes that the commission sits on top of payment processing fees and, when automatic fulfilment is used, on top of the printing and shipping costs as well. A digital download has no printing or shipping cost, so on that side of the order the 15% and the payment processing fees are the whole deduction. On a physical print with automatic fulfilment the lab and courier are paid first, the processing fee is taken, and the 15% is still calculated on the full pre-discount subtotal. Digital is the friendlier of the two, not the exempt one.

This is the part the help center states but does not illustrate. The table below is a worked example, not a Pixieset publication. It applies the published rule, 15% of the subtotal before discounts and coupon codes, to four free-plan orders at three order sizes. The last column is the commission expressed as a share of what the client actually paid.

Read across row B. The subtotal is 100 $, you take 20 $ off with a coupon, the client pays 80 $, and the commission is still 15 $ because it is pegged to the 100 $. Your discount did not shrink the fee by a cent. It shrank your own revenue by 20 $ and left the fee where it was, so the 15% headline became 18.75% of the money that arrived.

Row D is the one to watch. A 30% seasonal coupon on a 600 $ order leaves the client paying 420 $ while the commission stays at 90 $, which is 21.43% of what was paid. The deeper the discount, the higher the effective rate. Taxes and shipping are excluded from the base too, which cuts the other way and is worth knowing: the fee is not charged on the tax you collect or on the courier line.

The practical rule for a free-plan seller is simple. Price your discounts as if the 15% were a fixed cost of the list price, because that is exactly how it behaves. A sale is cheaper for the client and more expensive for you than the headline rate suggests.

Worth saying plainly, because it is true and it is cheap. The commission disappears at the first paid tier. Client Gallery Basic is 8 $ a month billed annually, or 10 $ a month paid monthly, and it is 0% commission. The same upgrade also removes Pixieset branding from your galleries, connects a custom domain, and turns on full-resolution download. On the pricing page those four things sit together in the Basic column, under "All Free features +".

So the arithmetic of staying free is easy to run. Basic at the annual rate costs 96 $ over twelve months, which is 8 $ multiplied by 12. Divide 96 $ by 0.15 and you get 640 $. Once your store subtotals for the year pass roughly 640 $, the 15% has cost you more than a year of Basic would have, and Basic charges nothing on top. Paying monthly at 10 $, the year costs 120 $ and the crossover is about 800 $ of subtotal.

In other words, if you sell anything at all through the gallery, the free plan is usually the expensive option. It is built for people who are not selling. There is a fuller breakdown of the tiers in our guide to what Pixieset actually costs per month.

clientgallery.io takes 0% commission for a structural reason rather than a generous one. There is no store in the product, so there is nothing to take a cut of. There is one plan at 10 $ a month or 100 $ a year, no per-gallery fees and no storage tiers. When money changes hands, the photographer puts their own payment link in the gallery and the client pays them directly, so nothing routes through us and nothing is deducted.

That has an obvious cost, and it should be stated before the benefits. clientgallery.io does no print fulfilment, no lab ordering and no storefront upsells at all. There is no product catalogue, no cart, no price list, no shipping. If you want a client to browse frame sizes and check out inside the gallery, this is not the tool.

What is included at the flat price: unlimited galleries, photos and clients under fair use, no platform branding on any client-facing page, the studio's own subdomain, Face Search, a two-way Lightroom Classic plugin, and sub-galleries inside a gallery. Clients download the whole gallery in one click or any single image, and hosted galleries never expire.

Fair use in figures, since this page compares plans. Uploaded photos are browser-compressed proof JPEGs of about 0.6 MB each, hosted for as long as the account exists. The ceilings are 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 is a paid feature: 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 product hosts JPEGs. It does not warehouse RAW files or master video, and that is what keeps one price flat for everyone.

A photographer whose print sales are a real revenue line should use a platform with a storefront and a lab behind it. On a paid Pixieset plan the commission is zero, so the commission argument does not apply to them at all. They are paying 8 $ a month and up for a shop that sells for them, and swapping that for a gallery with no store to save a subscription fee would be a bad trade.

The same holds for a studio whose business runs inside a print lab and a client relationship manager. If your orders flow automatically to a lab, if your upsells are configured, if the mobile apps for clients are part of what you sell, Pixieset or Pic-Time is where you belong. Keep it.

This page is for the other case: the studio that delivers finished JPEG galleries and gets paid separately, by invoice or a payment link, and is on the free plan only because paying a subscription felt unnecessary. For that studio the 15% is a tax on the few orders they do take, and neither a paid Pixieset tier nor a free one is the natural fit. If that is you, the feature-by-feature comparison is the next page to read.

Pixieset blocks automated fetching, so its pages were read in a browser session on 3 September 2026. Pixieset's pricing page shows local currency in some countries, including Canada; the figures here are the US dollar figures. The four-row order table is our own arithmetic on Pixieset's published rule, labelled as a worked example, not a Pixieset publication.

• Pixieset help center, "How does the 0% commission fee work" (15% on Client Gallery Free; 0% on Client Gallery Basic, Plus, Pro and Ultimate, on Suite Starter, Pro and Ultimate and on Studio 60, 80 and 120; commission calculated on the order subtotal before discounts, coupon codes, taxes or shipping; commission charged in addition to payment processing fees and, with automatic fulfilment, printing and shipping costs), read 3 September 2026, https://help.pixieset.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002975072-How-does-the-0-commission-fee-work
• Pixieset pricing (Client Gallery Basic at 8 $ a month billed annually or 10 $ a month; Basic adds custom branding, custom domain, full-resolution download and commission-free sales to the free plan), read 3 September 2026, https://pixieset.com/pricing/
• clientgallery.io plan and fair use (one plan at 10 $ a month or 100 $ a year, no store, no commissions, no per-gallery fees, no storage tiers, JPEG hosting, proof and ZIP ceilings), checked in the product 3 September 2026, https://clientgallery.io/