The Dollar Photo Club – a marketing tool for stock photography, priced at just $1 per downloaded photo. If you ever wanted a large library of photos (many of them free as well) for your website, then look no further!
What is Dollar Photo Club?
Dollar Photo Club is a company that claims to offer you more than 25 million stock photos, many of them which are curated by Fotolia, Europe’s leading micro stock agency. Dollar Club Photo is marketing itself as a “dedicated image bank for creative professionals“. This means that the website is aimed at those who have businesses on their own in the world of photography or anything related to images. But maybe this is not just for them. Maybe you are passionate about images, and want an impressive collection as well, so the Dollar Photo Club can be a good source from where you can find pictures from any domain you’re interested in.
Dollar Photo Club Price
Besides the fact that Dollar Photo Club only charges you $1 per every image you want to download, they claim to be adding more than 100,000 professional images every week. This is a detail that we will discuss more further on in this article.
The $1 charge per image also includes a heavily promoted feature by Dollar Photo Club, the fact that you get a license to use their images royalty free. You can use them for most commercial or non-commercial projects you may have in your mind for your own website, for example. The only mention here is that you are not allowed to resell them.
Among the most popular categories of images you can find on the Dollar Photo Club website are the following: people, sports and leisure, transportation, architecture, landscapes and many more. The images can be downloaded in an easy three-step process. First step implies you search for an image you’re interested in. To do that, just type any term in the search box and you can browse the available categories. The next step is choosing the image or images that you like. After that, you click on it and you will be redirected to more details section about the image. Third and final step, you simply click the download button and you’re good to go.
Dollar Photo Club Refund
Let us now give you details on the return and refund policy that exists for the Dollar Photo Club. The VIP members of the website are free of any hidden charges or commitments and have the following rate plans at their disposal: the monthly plan, priced at $10, where you have access at minimum 10 pictures to download per month, and the annual plan, priced at $99, with access to a minimum of 99 pictures available for downloading per year.
First thing that you need to keep in mind before choosing any of the above-described plans, is that the Dollar Photo Club has a limited membership policy, and this means that you must be formally approved by the Dollar Photo Club Review, to be able to download images from their platform.
Dollar Photo Club Cancelation
If you decide to cancel your subscription midterm, it will continue until it reaches its one-month or one-year term, depending on what plan you were on. After that, you will no longer have access to the Dollar Photo Club platform of pictures. In case you still have remaining credit, your account will be in a ‘’limited’’ state. This means that you will still be able to access pending downloads.
As we have already mentioned in the beginning of this article, the Dollar Photo Club is a subsidiary of Fotolia, and it does not appear to be registered with the Better Business Bureau. Fotolia, on the other hand, being the main company, has a B rating from the Better Business Bureau, with four closed complaints that were registered in the last years.
The next normal question anyone has in mind is if the Dollar Photo Club is indeed what you need for your business. Well, this might depend on what are you planning to use it for. As a normal consumer, having to pay just $1 per image seems like a great deal, plus you also receive creative licences for this amount. Also, the images that do not have royalties can be used pretty much anywhere. With regards to the membership process, well, that is a bit of a different story. Why we say that, you might ask.
This is because the process itself isn’t very clear and precise, and the Review committee doesn’t have a well-defined list of criteria for choosing the right applicants. Remember we mentioned that the Dollar Photo Club claims to add over 100,000 new images each week. The real deal is that this thing appears on their homepage, while on the About Us page, the claim is of 100,000 images per day! So, it is clearly causing some sort of confusion among customers, and we are not really sure what they really mean by changing statements like that.
It is known the fact that many contributors of the Dollar Photo Club website, aka professional photographers who sold their photos on this platform, ended up being not so satisfied with their services. This is mainly because the Dollar Photo Club is a part of Fotolia, and this company has apparently gained a bad reputation lately in the world of photography.
The bad reputation comes from the fact that they offer very low royalties, they reportedly had copyright issues, shady licensing policies and they also blocked many accounts which contained a great amount of credit, all this without any explanation. This is indeed not so cool about a company that supposedly is Europe’s leading micro stock agency. Because of all the things we mentioned earlier, and because of the rumour that sparked between freelancer photographers, as in Fotolia transferred images from their own platform onto the Dollar Photo Club one, photographers decided that it is best for them to take most of their work off their website.
The consequences of their actions translated into more than 400,000 photos being removed from Fotolia website in 2014.
The bottom line
Fotolia does not seem to be a good option for independent photographers anymore. That is why, many of them started looking for alternatives, eventually some that can offer better royalties for their pictures and with a better reputation in the branch.
If you are looking for the cheapest price to pay in order to download pictures for your website, blog or whatever, the Dollar Photo Club is still the better option to go with.
Let us now recap the main characteristics of the Dollar Photo Club and what is it that made it a viable option among freelance photographers and people who were searching for cheap stock images for their own websites or other businesses.
First, there is the overly-advertised $1 charge per downloaded photo. This represents in fact, the main feature of the website and the main reason for attracting customers.
Secondly, there is this claimed large variety of photographs and images from all sorts of domains. The most popular ones being landscapes, people, and others.
Price plans are also very affordable in comparison to other stock image platforms out there. For example, for just $99 per year, you can easily download as many images as you want, the minimum being of 99 in this case.
Of course, the negatives of all this are that photographers are paid very little in comparison to the value of their work. This is one of the main reasons why many of them turned to other platforms that appreciates their work better. This is also in close connection with the controversy surrounding Fotolia, the company from which the Dollar Photo Club has emerged.
The refund policy is also not the best, because if you cancel your subscription midterm you will still have to pay until it’s due, whether is one month or one year, depending on the plan you chose for yourself.
All in all, we have already mentioned almost all there is to know about the Dollar Photo Club, but we left out an important section, maybe the most important. That is customers’ opinions and reviews on this company. We all know that we like to do a little research before jumping into something. That is the case in here as well. Who wouldn’t be interested to hear other people’s opinions before deciding if it is worth your hard-earned money or not?
One customer shared his experience of purchasing photos from the Dollar Photo Club platform. He said that it was going fairly well for him, and was acceptable to pay $10 per month for the pictures he needed for some websites. Still, he was very surprised to see that there were 50 downloads missing from his account. He immediately addressed this issue to the customer service department, only to be told that he had bought an extensive licence for one of the photos, which, according to him, he didn’t.
After many emails of negotiation, the customer complained that he the Dollar Photo Club never refunded him. He then said that he will address this issue further with the Better Business Bureau or any other similar institution. We mentioned BBB, because, as you might remember, we said earlier that the company was not registered with them, but we will get into more details by the end of this article.
Another customer left a very positive review regarding the Dollar Photo Club. He was actually pretty content with the services they offered him. He also claimed that he never had any issues with his subscription, as he has already using the website for more than one and a half years and it was the best for what he needed.
Yet another customer also wrote about his pleasant collaboration with the Dollar Photo Club through Fotolia. He also mentioned about a few minor issues, which were all resolved in a rapid manner, as per his saying, by the customer service department.
As you can see, there are mixed reviews regarding the stock photo platform. As with everything else in this world, there is good, and there is also bad, not matter what. Nothing is perfect, nor will ever try to be. And, all that has a beginning must also come to an end eventually. That is what unfortunately happened to the Dollar Photo Club, maybe earlier than planned, but still happened.
As of April 2016, it was revealed that the Dollar Photo Club was bought by Adobe Stock, together with Fotolia. That meant that all the older customers who had similar complaints as the one described above, would have to report the Adobe Stock directly, as they had already plans of closing down the business.
How did this happen, and was it premeditated? Nobody actually knows for sure, but they sure took advantage of the fact that the giant Adobe purchased them, so they decided to call it quits. And they did that through an official announcement on Facebook. Maybe this was for the better, as they were already losing customers and perhaps wanted to try something different.
We already mentioned that customers with complaints would need to address Adobe Stocks from now on, if they wanted to be refunded or for any other issues they might have had with the Dollar Photo Club. But what about all other customers who still depended on the platform for the images and photographs they needed for their websites? Well, this part is more or less self-explanatory.Of course, they started to look for alternative solutions, meaning websites that offered similar services. And since there were many complaining about the quality of the images, maybe they now found better resources to feed their passion for photography, or why not, better rewards for their hard work.
When a chapter closes in your life, all you’re left with is to start another one. The same principle applies in business too, as pretty the comparison may sound, but it’s the pure truth. Never get stuck on something and always search for something new, possibly even better.
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