What Pic-Time costs in 2026
Pic-Time's Client Delivery Suite ladder, as of July 2026: a Free plan with 10GB of photo storage that drops to 3GB after six months, Beginner at $8 per month or $7 billed annually with 20GB, Professional at $25 per month or $21 annually with 100GB, and Advanced at $50 per month or $42 annually with unlimited storage. Additional brands are $6 per month on Professional and Advanced. Verify on pic-time.com before deciding, since plans change.
Two details are easy to miss. The free plan's storage halves after six months, which means the free tier is a trial with a countdown rather than a working tier. And commission applies to payments Pic-Time collects on your behalf: it is waived for self-collected payments on Professional and Advanced, so the store's real cost depends on which plan you are on and how you take money.
The subscription mismatch
A monthly plan bills for time. Photography revenue arrives in shoots. Those two shapes do not line up, and the gap is where the frustration comes from.
Say you deliver eighteen galleries a year, weighted heavily toward one busy season. On Beginner at $7 billed annually you pay $84 for the year, which is genuinely cheap, until you hit the 20GB ceiling somewhere around your third wedding and get moved to Professional at $21 a month, or $252 a year. Now the quiet months cost $21 each. Storage tiers are the mechanism: you are not buying galleries, you are renting a shelf that has to be big enough for your busiest week, all year long.
Lensdrop inverts that. You pay once per gallery, sized to the shoot: Small 5GB for $3, Standard 15GB for $7, Large 30GB for $13, XL 50GB for $20. Eighteen Standard galleries is $126 for the year with no ceiling to hit and no month where you paid for an empty shelf. Two free galleries at 15GB each come with the account.
Side by side
| Pic-Time | Lensdrop | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Monthly subscription, $8 to $50 as of July 2026 | One time per gallery, $3 to $20 by storage size |
| Free tier | 10GB, reduced to 3GB after 6 months | 2 galleries at 15GB each, no reduction |
| What you buy | A storage shelf sized for your busiest month | Storage for one specific shoot |
| Idle cost | Full subscription price | Zero. No gallery, no charge |
| Print and art store | Built in and well regarded, commission on collected payments | None. Delivery only, never touches client money |
| Client experience | Branded gallery site, optional client accounts | One PIN-protected link, no client signup |
| Proofing | Album proofing and selection tools | Watermarked previews and clean downloads as independent switches |
Competitor pricing summarized from public pricing pages as of July 2026 and simplified for comparison. Verify on the linked pages before deciding.
When Pic-Time is still the right choice
If you sell prints, Pic-Time is hard to beat. The art store is the best-designed one in this category, the automated sales campaigns genuinely produce revenue for photographers who use them, and album proofing with client selections is a real workflow, not a checkbox. High-volume studios also do well on Advanced, where unlimited storage at $42 a month works out cheap per delivery.
Lensdrop does not compete on any of that. There is no store, no sales automation, no CRM. It uploads a shoot, protects it with a PIN, shows watermarked previews, and hands over clean originals in bulk. If your galleries are a delivery step and not a sales channel, that is the whole job.
Trying the other model
- Deliver one real shoot on the free tier before changing anything. Two galleries at 15GB is enough for an honest test.
- Compare against your own numbers, not the plan page: galleries delivered last year divided by what you paid.
- Keep the store where it is if you sell prints. Nothing stops you delivering on one platform and selling on another.
- Let existing Pic-Time galleries run their course, then cancel at renewal.
Full tier list on pricing. To see how the whole category prices, read client gallery pricing compared, or the Pixieset comparison if that is the plan you are on.