iStockPhoto.com is a great website. It allows photographers, graphic designers, and other creative types to upload photos and artwork which can then be purchased as “stock” photography or artwork. This is great for aspiring photographers, who learn how to take photos that people want to buy. This is great for print and web designers who use those photos in their trade, because they get a large selection to choose from, and the photos are a lot cheaper than what was previously available ($1 vs. $400, in some cases).
But there is a dark side. An ugly, corrupt, sinful side to iStockPhoto.com, and it has to do with the way you purchase images. You might expect that to purchase images from iStockPhoto you would merely choose the photos you want and then check out and pay for them as you do on just about any other ecommerce site. But iStockPhoto gives you an incentive to buy “credits” for future use by discounting credits depending on how many you buy. Whereas a photo that requires 1 credit would cost you $1 dollar, what if you are buying 4-5 photos every day for use in web design projects? You can buy 50, 100, or even 2,000 credits at a time and get a hefty discount, therefore saving money over what you would pay if you only paid for the images at the time you chose them.
There’s just one problem–the credits expire after a year. Let’s say you buy 120 credits for $165, because you then get a 9% discount. That’s all great, until you login to your account, which had 40 credits left in it, and you find out there are none. Where did the credits go? Upon contacting customer support, they’ll tell you the credits expired, and they’ll generally reinstate the credits for you and extend them for a few more months if you ask nicely. But why do they expire in the first place? Are the bits and bytes representing those credits getting stale on the servers and causing the other bits to get irritated? Are those bits and bytes taking up valuable storage space?
“But wait,” you say “Don’t they send you an email or something to tell you the credits are expiring? Don’t they give you a chance to do something about it before they expire?” Yes, that would be nice, but no, they don’t do that. They used to, but they don’t any more. The credits just expire.
“Well, they certainly make it obvious when you are buying the credits that they are going to expire, don’t they?” you might query, but no, they don’t. I suspect 99.9999% of the customers who haven’t experienced this have no idea their credits are automatically set to expire, without notice.
Now why in the world would iStockPhoto do this? Don’t they understand that a 9% discount means nothing when you end up losing 30% of the credits you purchased? I think they do understand this, but the bottom line is this–they make a lot of money off of expired credits, and not enough people complain to make it worth their while to change the policy. In other words, it’s a scam. And a brilliant one, I might add. I can’t imagine any other business getting away with it. Imagine if you bought a new car and paid for it in cash, and four years into driving it you went to drive home from work and your car was gone. You contact the police, but they don’t know anything. A few days later you drive by the dealer where you bought the car and you see your car sitting in the lot. So in confusion and awkward rage you rush inside and say “What the heck is my car doing back in your lot?!” and the dealer says “Oh, your ownership expired. It’s in the agreement. Didn’t you read the part of the agreement where it says after four years your ownership of the car expires and we get it back?”
I mean, that’d be quite the racket, wouldn’t it? Great business model, if you can keep the government from passing laws against it. Apparently iStockPhoto has bribed the right people, or at least kept under their radar.
This just happened to me…. UGH. I’m so upset. I was in the middle of purchasing a photo for a client when it told me that my credits expired.
THIS IS CRAP. I own those credits. In California, we figured out along time that gift certificates are purchased goods. They don’t expire so what gives istockphoto.com the right to expire my credits when I purchased them with cash???
I will call them and complain. Hopefully they’ll extend it otherwise I’ll be contacting BBB and the consumer ripoff websites.
ARGH!!
I agree with you Meegan. This really sucks!
I am a regular customer at iStockphoto and had a good balance of credits.
Logged on today to pick up some photos for a project and “POOF”, they’re all gone.
Oh well, there’s always Stock Exchange (http://www.sxc.hu) Their photos are free!
Yep – Happened to me to.
One good thing is I complained to them and they said they would give me an extension.
BUT I will still never use them as simply don’t agree doing business like that, is STEALING MONEY!!
There are plenty of alternatives so they will slowly lose people overtime.
I’m in CA, my credits expired and all I had to say was that it was illegal in California. It’s a pain, but I’ve had them renew them about 5 times. I won’t deal with them again after I use all my credits.
I agree absolutely. This is a ripoff plain & simple.
Actually this kind of thing happens a lot here in Ireland in the offline world.
You can buy someone a shopping gift voucher and it will have an expiry date!
Why?? My cash that I used to pay doesn’t expire does it?
You Californians need to settle down. You agree to have your credits expire after a year from purchase – if you cannot read – your bad. Frankly I am sick of California, if you were not so stupid you would not need any ridiculous laws like this. Move on people – this is life. And besides, isn’t istock in Canada? I just checked their user agreement – you agree to obey the laws of ‘The province of Alberta, Canada’ – so guess what your stupid California rules are useless! Suck it up and move on!
NYC
Hey annoyed, are you an istock employee or just an arrogant dick?
What exactly would make you think that anything one has purchased should ever expire?
I live in the province of Alberta and am not aware of other companies which behave that way – not because there’s a law, but because they don’t want to piss off customers duh.
While I agree, the site warns you upon purchase, it’s still ridiculous and no one should have to like the stupid system they have in place. The whole credits think sucks too. What is istock, a dating site?
Yea this just happened to me and I knew the credits were expiring but didn’t when I bought them. At the time the credits were expiring, I didn’t have a client that needed images therefore I either downloaded some images I didn’t need and couldn’t get reimbursed for or I loose the credits. Either way, my business was going to loose money.
I am done with i-stock. They have abused the design and photography community too much. I think we as designers as a whole need to boycott this ruthless unethical company.
Their prices have gone up by 25% in the past year and I haven’t seen a single increase in the price I as a contributor receive.
I would like to see a cooperative site of designers, illustrators and photographers created to compete with istock, where any profits are shared back with the people who actually do the work.
We’ve also just discovered we’re about to lose 75 credits. Which I know we should have used by now, but, ….
I’m a bit annoyed at iStockPhoto. Every few months….
-> Price per credit goes up
-> Resolutions per photo has decreases
-> Credits per photo increases
…And now there’s an expiry on pre-paid credits.
It’s classic monopolistic strategy from Getty Images. But then again, we’ve seen it with Microsoft, Google, why would anybody behave differently.
I agree with Joshua though, that if I knew credits would expire, I would not have advanced purchased so many.
I also agree with JesseK. We need a new competitor to iStockPhoto wo operates in an ethical and customer focussed way (customers are both purchasers and photographers).
Long live capitalism, as long as competition is fair and open.
Chalk up another person burned by istockphoto. What a shameful and fraudulent practice. No notifications. No disclosures. No emails. I feel like I was just mugged. Bye Bye iscamphoto.com
Funny thing is that they probably would generate almost the same income (and probably more) if they dropped the whole expiration thing. I totally forgot I had credits until they emailed me to let me know they were expiring. Now I am upset when before I would not have even noticed and they would still have had my money.
iStockphoto.com is not the only one that does this. 123rf.com’s credits also expire one year from date of purchase. I had almost 300 credits and they nearly expired, had it not been for the 7 day warning they sent via email. Of course, I can’t possibly use 300 credits in 7 days, which means I’ll likely lose those credits. At an average of $1 per credit, that’s almost $300!
Money doesn’t expire, so why would credits that you spend the money for? I smell a class action lawsuit coming someday soon against these bozos. Although I assume it will be a tough case, seeing that most of these guys are outside of the US and – as we’ve seen with Vonage – generally operate their business however they see fit, ethical or not, legal or not. They’re not held by same legal guidelines as the businesses that are actually located inside the states.
If a lawyer wants a “case of a lifetime” they should file a class-action lawsuit against iStockphoto for this practice. I’m not sure where their corporation is located but I know in California it is illegal for gift certificates (i.e. credits) to expire.
Thanks for writing this article. I just got an email saying my credits are going to expire. Complete BS!! If I paid for something, and the merchant fails to deliver what I purchased, you better believe I’ll be getting my money back!! I will take great satisfaction in calling up my credit card company and initiating a charge back. Not only will I get my money back, but iStockPhoto will get dinged with a $25 chargeback fee from their merchant processor! So they are out the money PLUS have to pay $25. Suck on it!
I am an arrogant dick I guess. All I am saying is that if you cannot read and/or do not read what you sign, you pay the consequences. On the other hand, I had istockphoto renew my credits numerous times – never a problem. And again – California laws are only valid in California – not even Texas has to honour California laws.
@Annoyed,
You’re not arrogant. You’re absolutely right that the terms of the agreement are provided for all their customers… although I would argue that an important item such as credit expiration should be more prominently displayed. Note: I’m not sure what the current sign-up page looks like but when I was purchasing credits it was very easy to skip that important piece of information.
@Jason,
A very interesting idea. I’m no lawyer but as I understand it when you contest a charge on your credit card there is a checkbox on the form they send you that says something like, “I never received the product or services promised by the company”. I could understand how you could argue that you never received the services and they would probably return with a copy of the terms of service which include the expiration. In the end it would come down to the Credit Card making the final decision of who is “right”. It would be an interesting experiment to see what happens.
I have 24 123RF.com credits that are soon to expire. Anyone want to use them? Email me at boveybasketball@hotmail.com
I got fed up with iStock ripping me off at every corner – increasing prices, expiring credits, and reducing resolution. So I finally made the leap and used up all my remaining credits before they could be expired, and switched to a different site – http://www.canstockphoto.com – their prices are much lower and the images look the exact same. I’ll save a few hundred dollars a year, and get better service. See ya Getty.
It may not be legal for iStock to expire your credits. The gift card provisions of the Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act of 2009 likely applies here. I am not a lawyer but my reading of http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=111_cong_public_laws&docid=f:publ209.111.pdf makes me think that iStock is looking for a class action law suit.