Most gallery platforms give you a free or cheap plan and make it back by taking a percentage of everything you sell through it — prints, digitals, albums. It feels painless, because you only pay when you get paid. Then your volume grows, and the percentage quietly becomes the most expensive line in your business. Here is the honest math, and how to know when it flips.
What the platforms take (as of July 2026)
These are store commissions — the cut taken from what your client pays you through the gallery — on public plans as of July 2026:
- Pixieset — 15% of each store sale on its free plan. Paid plans lower or remove it; you pay a subscription instead.
- Pic-Time — a tiered sale commission of 15%, 8%, or 6%, depending on your plan.
- CloudSpot — a 15% sale commission on three of its five tiers; the top tiers drop it.
None of this is predatory. On a free plan, a commission is a fair trade — you pay nothing until you actually sell, and the vendor only wins when you win. The trap is not the percentage. The trap is leaving yourself on it after your volume has outgrown it.
The math at volume
A percentage is invisible per order and brutal per year. Run it on your own numbers:
- Sell $1,000 a month in digitals and prints at 15% — that is $150 a month, $1,800 a year.
- Sell $3,000 a month at 15% — $450 a month, $5,400 a year.
Compare that to a flat subscription in the low tens of dollars a month. Somewhere between those two lines is a crossover — the point where the commission plan costs you more than a paid plan with no commission would. For a lot of working studios, that crossover arrives faster than they expect, because a single album order or a busy print season lands entirely inside the 15%.
Find your own crossover
You do not need a spreadsheet. One question: what do you sell through the gallery in a normal month?
- Multiply your monthly sales by the commission rate. That is what the “free” plan costs you this month.
- Compare it to the monthly price of a no-commission plan — on the same platform, or elsewhere.
- If the commission is bigger, you are paying to keep a lower sticker price. That is backwards.
The honest version of this cuts against us too: if you sell almost nothing through your gallery, a free-plus-commission plan is genuinely the cheapest place to be, and you should stay there. Commissions only become the enemy at volume.
The 0% alternative
The other model is a flat subscription and no cut of your sales at all. That is how Everyframe works: 0% of your client payments, on every plan, forever. Your only costs are the subscription and your own Stripe processing — the same processing you would pay anywhere. Sell $500 or $50,000 through your galleries in a month; the platform’s take is the same flat number either way.
The reason we can promise that is structural, not generous: our only revenue is the subscription, so we have no incentive to sit between you and your buyer. If you are weighing a switch, the mechanics are in how to switch platforms without losing a client, and the numbers are on pricing.
Do the multiplication on your own last three months. Whatever it tells you — stay, or move — make it a decision you did the math on, not a default you never questioned.
Your brand, end to end.
Booking, galleries, delivery, and payments on your own domain, at a 0% platform fee.