The thing plan pages hide: what is being metered
Before comparing prices, work out what each platform charges you for. It is the single biggest driver of your real bill, and it is never on the pricing page in plain language.
- Metered on storage: Pixieset, Pic-Time, Pixpa. Your plan is sized to the biggest pile of photos you will ever have live at once, and it stays that size all year.
- Metered on photo count: ShootProof. You are counting files, so a photographer shooting 40MB raw exports and one shooting 6MB JPEGs pay the same, which cuts in your favour if your files are large.
- Not metered, priced on features: SmugMug. Unlimited uploads across all tiers, with the tiers gating commerce and site features instead.
- Metered per delivery: Lensdrop. You buy storage for one shoot, once, and nothing runs between shoots.
Storage metering is the one that bites hardest, because galleries accumulate. You are not paying for this month's shoot, you are paying for every shoot still sitting live from the last two years.
The numbers, as of July 2026
| Platform | Free tier | Entry paid | Top tier | Meters |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pixieset | 3GB | About $10/mo for 10GB | About $40/mo | Storage |
| Pic-Time | 10GB, drops to 3GB after 6 months | $8/mo, or $7 annually, 20GB | $50/mo, or $42 annually, unlimited | Storage |
| ShootProof | 100 photos | About $10/mo for 1,500 photos | About $50/mo unlimited | Photo count |
| SmugMug | Trial only | $29/mo, or $20 annually | $52/mo, or $37 annually | Nothing, unlimited uploads |
| Lensdrop | 2 galleries at 15GB each | $3 per 5GB gallery | $20 per 50GB gallery | Per delivery, one time |
Summarized from public pricing pages as of July 2026 and simplified for comparison. Monthly and annual rates differ on every platform here, several run permanent promotions, and commerce features are often priced separately. Verify on the linked sources before deciding.
What each one is actually good at
Pixieset is the safest all-rounder, and the closest thing this category has to a default. Galleries, website builder, studio manager and store under one login. The catch is a 3GB free tier that no working photographer can use, and a 15% store commission on that free plan.
Pic-Time has the best-looking galleries and by some distance the best print store, with automated sales campaigns that reliably convert for photographers who lean into selling. It is the choice if galleries are a revenue channel rather than a handover step. See the Pic-Time comparison for the detail.
ShootProof bundles real studio business tooling: contracts, invoicing, 0% commission on print sales across paid plans. Photo-count metering suits photographers with big files and modest volume, and punishes anyone delivering thousands of frames per event.
SmugMug is a hosting and portfolio product first, with unlimited uploads and a real website behind it. It is the most expensive entry point here, and client delivery is a feature of the site rather than the point of it.
Lensdrop is the narrowest by design: one PIN-protected link, watermarked previews, clean bulk downloads, nothing else. No store, no website, no CRM, 0% commission because it never touches client money. See pricing.
Doing the sum for your own year
The comparison that matters is not tier against tier, it is total against total. Take last year: how many galleries did you deliver, and what did delivery cost you in total?
- Under 12 galleries a year: per-gallery pricing almost always wins. Twelve Standard galleries is $84 against $120 to $250 for a mid subscription.
- 12 to 30 galleries a year: it is close, and the answer depends on file sizes and whether you sell prints. Do the arithmetic properly rather than guessing.
- Over 30 galleries a year, or you sell prints: an unlimited subscription usually wins on delivery cost, and the store may pay for the whole thing by itself.
- Wildly seasonal work: per-gallery pricing wins by more than the raw numbers suggest, because the quiet months genuinely cost nothing.
One more variable that never shows up on a plan page: what happens to old galleries. On a storage-metered subscription they quietly push you up a tier until you delete them. Price that in.
If you are in India
Everything above is priced in dollars, which is not the whole story for an Indian photographer. Add the exchange rate, a foreign transaction markup of roughly 2% to 3.5% on most Indian cards, and no UPI option. There is also a set of India-built platforms this comparison does not cover: Pixpa, Kamero and TurtlePic.
The rupee-first version of this comparison is client gallery software in India, and the Pixieset-specific one is Pixieset in India.