Does Pixieset really take 15% of print sales?

On the free plan, yes. Pixieset’s pricing page states a 15% commission fee on store sales for free accounts, and no commission on any paid plan. That is why the calculator will move you off the free tier as soon as you enter any meaningful sales figure: 15% of a few thousand in print sales costs far more than the $10 a month that removes it.

Why is Pic-Time’s commission column blank?

Because Pic-Time does not publish its rates. Their pricing page says commission is reduced with each plan increase and is charged on your markup rather than production cost, and that self-collected payments on Professional and Advanced are commission-free. There is no percentage anywhere on the page, so we leave the cell empty and mark the total with a plus sign rather than invent a figure.

How is ShootProof compared, when it counts photos rather than storage?

ShootProof publishes both limits: a photo count per plan and an estimated storage capacity in gigabytes, the latter based on a 50 MB maximum file size. The calculator holds each plan to both, converting your gigabytes into a photo count at 10 MB per delivered JPEG, so whichever limit you hit first is the one that picks your tier.

Why is Picflow shown as unavailable when I enter sales?

Because Picflow has no store. It is a proofing and review tool, and its own feature table has no storefront, no print sales and no checkout, so there is nothing for a commission to apply to and no way to take the sales you entered. Listing it as the cheapest option at 0% commission would be the wrong answer to the question you asked. Set sales to zero and it competes on storage, where it is genuinely strong.

Are these prices current?

Every figure is read off the vendor’s own pricing page and re-checked quarterly, with the verification date shown under the results table. Where a vendor renders its prices with JavaScript, we drive their billing toggle in a real browser and read both the monthly and the annual figure rather than quoting a third party. Most comparison articles on this topic are a year or more out of date, which is why the numbers here often differ from what you have read elsewhere.

Why do the totals ignore introductory offers?

Because they lapse. Format and Pixpa both advertise a first-year rate that reverts afterwards, and a three year total built on a price you pay once would overstate the saving. The calculator uses the standard rate throughout and says so in each platform’s notes.

What does Xposure include that these prices do not?

Online booking, deposits, contracts with e-signatures and two-way calendar sync are part of every paid Xposure plan. On Pixieset the equivalent is Studio Manager, a separate subscription on top of the Client Gallery figures shown here. That gap widens the comparison well beyond the storage price.

Gallery platform cost calculator

Storage tiers and sales commission, priced out over a year across Pixieset, Pic-Time, ShootProof, Pixpa, Format, Picflow and Xposure. Every number comes from the vendor's own pricing page, with the date we checked it.

Free, no account, nothing to install. Your answers stay in your browser.

Your cheapest option

Xposure Pro

€180 a year, billed annually. 250 GB covers your 150 GB, custom domain included. That is €69 a year less than Pixieset, or €208 over three years on the same usage.

€540

Three years on Xposure Pro

€748

Three years on Pixieset Pro

€256

A year between the cheapest and dearest option for this usage

Annual cost of each client gallery platform for the usage entered above
Platform	Plan	Subscription	Commission	Total per year
Xposure	Pro250 GB covers your 150 GB, custom domain included	€180	€0	€180
Pixieset	Pro1000 GB covers your 150 GB, custom domain included	€249	€0	€249
Format	Pro Plus1000 GB covers your 150 GB, custom domain included	€270	€0	€270
ShootProof	25,00025,000 photos and 1,250 GB covers your 150 GB, custom domain included, counted live, not per year	€277	€0	€277
Pic-Time	Advancedunlimited storage, custom domain included	€436	€0	€436
Pixpa	No plan meets your storage requirement.
Picflow	Picflow has no store, so it cannot sell the prints or downloads you entered. Set sales to 0 to compare it on storage alone.

List prices before tax, for one photographer. Card processing is left out because it goes to Stripe rather than the platform. Prices verified 2026-08-11 or later, from each vendor's own pricing page.

Sources, exclusions and per-platform detail

Where the prices come from

Every figure is read off the vendor's own pricing page, not a review site, and re-checked quarterly. Non-euro plans are converted at $1.1548 to €1 as of 2026-08-11, so your card rate on the day will differ slightly.

Xposure · pricing page
Pixieset · pricing page · full comparison
Pic-Time · pricing page · full comparison
ShootProof · pricing page · full comparison
Pixpa · pricing page · full comparison
Format · pricing page · full comparison
Picflow · pricing page · full comparison

Worth knowing about each platform

Xposure

Every paid plan carries unlimited client galleries. Storage is the only thing that meters delivery, so a busy year costs you nothing extra until you actually run out of space.
Starter takes a 10% platform fee on sales and bookings. Pro and Studio take 0%.
Extra storage is +€2/mo per 50 GB on any paid plan, which the calculator applies before moving you up a tier when that is cheaper.
Online booking, deposits, contracts with e-signatures and two-way calendar sync are included on every paid plan rather than sold as a separate product.

Pixieset

These are Client Gallery plans. Pixieset sells Website and Studio Manager as separate subscriptions, so a booking or CRM workflow costs more than the figures here.
The free plan takes 15% of store sales. Every paid plan is commission-free.
Annual billing is advertised as $8, $16, $24 and $40 per month for Basic, Plus, Pro and Ultimate.

Pic-Time

Pic-Time is the one platform here that does not publish its commission rates. Their pricing page says commission "is reduced with each plan increase" and applies to your markup rather than production cost. We will not put a number on that, so sales commission is left out of the Pic-Time total.
The free plan starts at 10 GB and drops to 3 GB after a few months. Their pricing page says 3 months in one place and 6 months in another.
Storage figures are photo storage. Video storage is metered separately (1, 5, 30 and 60 GB by tier).
Annual billing is advertised as $7, $21 and $42 per month for Beginner, Professional and Advanced.

ShootProof

ShootProof meters photos rather than gigabytes, and the cap is how many photos are online at once rather than how many you upload in a year. Delete a gallery and the space comes back.
Its published GB capacities (5, 75, 250 and 1,250 GB) assume a 50 MB maximum file size. The calculator holds a plan to both limits, the photo count and the gigabytes, so whichever binds first is the one that decides your tier.
Every plan is commission-free, including the free one, and client galleries are unlimited on all of them.
A custom subdomain (galleries.yourname.com pointed at ShootProof) is listed on their features page. ShootProof does not say on its pricing page which plans include it, so it is treated as a paid-plan feature here.
Annual billing is advertised as $10.99, $19.99, $26.67 and $50 per month.

Pixpa

Pixpa charges 0% commission on every plan. There is no free tier, only a 15-day trial.
The yearly prices Pixpa advertises are a first-year intro discount. These figures use the standard renewal rate (20% off monthly), which is what you actually pay from year two.
Storage counts original files for galleries and downloads. Web versions on the portfolio site do not count against it.
These are All-in-One plans. Pixpa also sells a cheaper Client Galleries Only plan type for photographers who already have a website; it does not publish those prices in the page source, so they are not modelled here.

Format

Format sells portfolio website plans with client galleries attached, so the price covers both. Storage figures are its "image storage" allowance; file transfers are metered separately at 2, 5 and 10 GB by tier.
Format caps how many client galleries you can have: 50 on Pro and 250 on Pro Plus.
Basic is listed at $10 a month billed annually, but Format's own comparison table gives it no image storage and no online store, so it cannot deliver galleries and is excluded above.
The custom domain is free for the first year only.
Format was running a first-year promotion (Pro at $12 and Pro Plus at $15 a month) when we checked. These figures use the standard annual rate you pay from year two.
The store is commission-free but product-capped, at 15 products on Pro and 1,000 on Pro Plus.

Picflow

Picflow is a proofing and review tool. Its feature table has no store, no print sales and no checkout, so there is nothing for a commission to apply to and nothing to sell through.
Galleries are unlimited on every tier, including the free one.
A custom domain starts on Pro. Plus and Free are on a picflow.com address.
Picflow prices in the visitor's local currency. These are the euro figures a European sees; a US visitor is quoted in dollars.
Annual billing is advertised as €11, €17 and €132 per month for Plus, Pro and Biz. Picflow shows a per-month rate rather than a yearly total, so the annual figures here are that rate times twelve.

The headline price is rarely the price

Client gallery platforms compete on the first number you see, and that number almost never matches what leaves your account. Three things move it: which storage tier you actually land on, what the platform takes from your sales, and whether the features you need are on the plan you were quoted or on the one above it.

The gap is largest at the two ends. A photographer with a small archive and no print sales can run on a free tier indefinitely and should. A photographer selling a few thousand a year in prints on that same free tier is paying a fortune in commission for the privilege of not paying a subscription.

What the calculator is actually comparing

Storage tiers, not storage. You do not pay for the 40 GB you use, you pay for the tier that contains it. Being 2 GB over a boundary costs the same as being 60 GB over.
Commission on sales. Pixieset takes 15% on its free plan and nothing on paid plans. ShootProof takes nothing on any plan. Format takes nothing but caps you at 15 products on Pro. Pic-Time charges on markup at rates it does not publish. Picflow has no store at all. Xposure takes 10% on Starter and nothing on Pro and Studio.
Intro pricing versus what you renew at. Pixpa and Format both advertise a first-year discount. The figures here use the standard rate, because that is what you pay from year two onward.
Custom domain. Tick the box and plans that cannot put galleries on your own domain drop out. ShootProof qualifies on a subdomain pointed at its servers rather than a root domain, which is worth knowing before you tick it.

The figures are conservative in your current platform's favour

Every total here is Client Gallery pricing only. On Pixieset, booking, contracts and a portfolio website are separate subscriptions on top of the number shown, so the real gap is wider than the table. Xposure includes all three in every paid plan. Our Pixieset comparison works through that properly.

Payment processing is excluded, since Stripe and PayPal charge roughly the same everywhere and none of it reaches the platform. Tax is excluded because it depends on where you are.

How to read the result

Platforms are sorted by total annual outlay, cheapest first, with anything that cannot meet your requirements pushed to the bottom alongside the reason. A total marked with a plus sign carries a commission the vendor does not publish, so the true figure is higher than shown.

The three year figures matter more than the annual ones. A twenty euro monthly difference is easy to shrug off and costs seven hundred and twenty over the life of a typical setup, which is a lens.

Common questions

Does Pixieset really take 15% of print sales?: On the free plan, yes. Pixieset’s pricing page states a 15% commission fee on store sales for free accounts, and no commission on any paid plan. That is why the calculator will move you off the free tier as soon as you enter any meaningful sales figure: 15% of a few thousand in print sales costs far more than the $10 a month that removes it.
Why is Pic-Time’s commission column blank?: Because Pic-Time does not publish its rates. Their pricing page says commission is reduced with each plan increase and is charged on your markup rather than production cost, and that self-collected payments on Professional and Advanced are commission-free. There is no percentage anywhere on the page, so we leave the cell empty and mark the total with a plus sign rather than invent a figure.
How is ShootProof compared, when it counts photos rather than storage?: ShootProof publishes both limits: a photo count per plan and an estimated storage capacity in gigabytes, the latter based on a 50 MB maximum file size. The calculator holds each plan to both, converting your gigabytes into a photo count at 10 MB per delivered JPEG, so whichever limit you hit first is the one that picks your tier.
Why is Picflow shown as unavailable when I enter sales?: Because Picflow has no store. It is a proofing and review tool, and its own feature table has no storefront, no print sales and no checkout, so there is nothing for a commission to apply to and no way to take the sales you entered. Listing it as the cheapest option at 0% commission would be the wrong answer to the question you asked. Set sales to zero and it competes on storage, where it is genuinely strong.
Are these prices current?: Every figure is read off the vendor’s own pricing page and re-checked quarterly, with the verification date shown under the results table. Where a vendor renders its prices with JavaScript, we drive their billing toggle in a real browser and read both the monthly and the annual figure rather than quoting a third party. Most comparison articles on this topic are a year or more out of date, which is why the numbers here often differ from what you have read elsewhere.
Why do the totals ignore introductory offers?: Because they lapse. Format and Pixpa both advertise a first-year rate that reverts afterwards, and a three year total built on a price you pay once would overstate the saving. The calculator uses the standard rate throughout and says so in each platform’s notes.
What does Xposure include that these prices do not?: Online booking, deposits, contracts with e-signatures and two-way calendar sync are part of every paid Xposure plan. On Pixieset the equivalent is Studio Manager, a separate subscription on top of the Client Gallery figures shown here. That gap widens the comparison well beyond the storage price.

One subscription instead of three

Xposure puts your portfolio, client galleries and full booking system on one bill, from €8 a month with 0% on sales from €18. The free tier does not expire and does not ask for a card.

See Xposure pricing

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