Stocksy Review 2023

Stocksy pricing

Image pricing

Stocksy sells images only on-demand, which means you buy each image separately—there are no subscriptions. All images are licensed under the Standard Royalty-Free License, which covers commercial use, including:

• Up to 500,000 copies in print
• Unlimited digital impressions (web, social media, ebooks, etc.)
• Worldwide, all media, for unlimited time
• Inclusion on websites, blog posts, advertising, editorial product packaging, book covers, reports, etc.

You can buy images in four sizes that differ in price, best use case, and resolution.

Image Size	Small	Medium	Large	X-Large
Cost	$15	$30	$75	$125
Best for	Web use where you don’t need a full resolution (articles, blogs, brochures, and social media)	Web use where you need higher resolution (background, wide layouts) or small prints	Large web use and large prints	Full resolution (billboards, full-page prints, posters)
Resolution	0.5MP (815×614px)	2MP (1630×1227px)	5.7MP (2751×2072px)	12MP+ (4256×2832px+)
Size	11.3 × 8.5″ (72 dpi)	5.4 × 4.1″ (300dpi)	9.2 × 6.9″ (300 dpi)	15.4 × 11.6″ (300dpi)

Video pricing

Stocksy sells videos only on-demand under the Standard Royalty-Free License, which covers commercial use, including:

• Unlimited digital impressions (web, social media, ebooks, etc.)
• Worldwide, all media, for unlimited time
• Advertising, video games, films, blog posts, websites, editorial, etc.

You can buy videos in five sizes that differ in price, best use case, and resolution.

Video Size	720P H.264	1080P H.264	1080P ungraded	4K H.264	4K ungraded
Cost	$75	$175	$275	$300	$400
Best for	Social media, mobile content	Blogs, YouTube, Vimeo, etc.	Color grading based on your project	Short films, commercials, web content	The highest quality
Resolution	1280×720px	1920×1080px	1920×1080px	4096×2160px	4096×2160px

All Stocksy videos are available in H.264 quality. Some videos are also available in the ProRes lossy video compression format, which requires less editing processing power.

Extended Licenses

When the Standard Royalty-Free License does not cover your use case, you should buy an Extended license. Extended Licenses are more expensive than the Standard License but grant you additional rights.

• Multi-seat ($100/image; $200/video): A Multi-Seat Extended license grants you the right to share the image or video with all users in your team or organization. This is ideal for when several people work on the same project. The Multi-seat License is automatically included when buying the following two licenses.
• Unlimited print run ($300/image): Since the Standard License lets you use the image only for 500,000 prints or copies, you need the Unlimited Print Run License for larger projects.
• Product For Resale ($500/image; $750/video): The Standard License only covers the uses where the asset (image or video) is part of a larger design or project. However, when the assets represent the product’s main value, you need a Product For Resale License. These use cases include T-shirts, wallpapers, mugs, posters, apps, videos, templates, and screensavers.

Market Freeze

Market Freeze gives you exclusive use of an image or video for a certain time period. During this time, no one else can use it. This license is useful for large commercial campaigns when you plan to run an ad in front of an international audience. We call this type of license a “rights-managed” license.

With this license, you also get all Extended Licenses and the original file size of images and videos. Here’s how much they cost:

• 6 months: $1,250/image; $1,500/video
• 1 year: $2,500/image; $3,000/video
• 2 years: $4,500/image; $5,400/video
• 3 years: $6,000/image; $7,200/video
• 4 years: $7,500/image; $9,000/video
• 5 years: $9,000/image; $10,800/video

How Stocksy stacks up

Compared to other stock photo sites, Stocksy is quite expensive. For starters, there are no subscriptions, which usually guarantee the lowest prices ($0.22/image at Shutterstock). On top of that, the on-demand prices are also higher, costing from $15 to $125 per image, whereas other agencies charge around $10 per image.

Higher image quality or broader license usually justifies the higher price (like with Getty Images, although we still don’t think it’s worth your money). Yet, we don’t think that the Stocksy image quality is any better than at other microstock sites, especially considering the premium collections of Adobe Stock and iStock.

For these reasons, we don’t think Stocksy is worth the extra money, especially when you need images for everyday use, such as on blogs or social media. We would consider buying from Stocksy if we were starting an international commercial project, for an illustration in an ebook (custom graphics would be better), or for a website’s homepage.

Frequently asked questions