Shutterstock Reviews 2,736

Shutterstock ropes you into a annual subscription even if you only want to pay monthly. They put it in tiny letting in the bottom of the pricing page. They offer no contracts but you have to select it not just select monthly billing. Be careful using them. They only give you 10 credits a month that don't roll over even if you are in the contracted plan. Shutterstock sucks and I will never use them again. That's shady business if you ask me. There are so many more sites you can use to get better images for a better price.

Absolutely shocking. Got charged twice when I only followed the process for one transaction. This company are impossible to contact with zero customer services. When I challenged the incorrect payment with PayPal, Shutterstock locked my account almost instantly so I could no longer access details of my purchase. Out of pocket with no resolve.

They charged me $75 to cancel my subscription

I thought I was paying a total of $29 annually when in fact it was $29 per month! When I realized this, I went to cancel. This cost me $160 to cancel early. I got 3 downloads. Very expensive pictures! This is definitely a deceitful company and I warn others not to get caught in their web of lies!!!

This matter has now been resolved. Thank you Trust Pilot for your support with it.

The subscription model is deliberately tricky. If you sign up for a monthly subscription you are locking yourself into paying for a year, and if you try to cancel before that year is up you can't cancel without paying for the entire year's worth. It feels like a gym membership from 2003. Shutterstock has decided to resort to old-fashioned subscription traps to wring all the cash they can out of people who are willing to pay for images they could steal if they wanted to. That's what you get for trying to be honest and support artists whose work is on that site. Gross. I will never use this 'service' again and these tactics will make them irrelevant long before AI does.

They're cheating with the subscription. They offer an Unlimited Downloads subscription, but you can't download all the photos, and they claim Unlimited is only 100 photos per day. I got my money back, but the service is terrible. They're ignorant, and their customer service leaves much to be desired. They act like the customer is just a piggy bank for them to pay. I don't recommend them.

Shutterstock is a scam! Charging a cancellation fee when I didn't initially want the subscription! Garbage, wicked, shameful,

Worst Customer Service and Worst Platform

I got tricked by Shutterstock when I applied for free trial to a month to month subscription program. I was told I could cancel at anytime. Not only did they charge me $100 for the first month, they tried to charge me additionally for any footage I tried to download. Now they are trying to charge me a cancellation fee of over $500 to cancel any further monthly charges. it was next to impossible to find the cancellation page too.

Charging to delete your account???? What a scam. I wasn't even aware I signed up for this service, which was already a red flag for me, and now it charges me insane fees to delete the account?? This company needs to be shut down.

I do not consider myself to be a problematic customer, on the contrary. But Shutterstock has been by far the worst experience I had with a stock service and subscription.

When I started using the service I noticed it was overpriced (but that's their prerrogative). In order to have a reasonable price, you need to sign up for a yearly subscription paid monthly (again, their rules, that's okay).

The problem came when I tried to cancel my subscription. If you try to cancel it prior to finishing the year-long service, you need to pay upfront for all pending monthly payments and you can't even use the service for the remaining period!

There's no such option as "Cancel Auto-renowal". So, if you want to keep using the credits you are paying for you need to keep subscribed and remember to cancel the renowal the exact date ir goes through. If you fail to do this, they will charge you and if you want to cancel, you'll need to pay for the full next year without access to your credits.

Wrote to them 3 times and they told me they were sorry, that those were the conditions I agreed to. I never agreed to be subscribed forever to a service which is impossible to cancel!

Again: I have no problem with their pricing or conditions for subscription, but to make it practically impossible to cancel the autorenowal is abusive and disturbing. And you are powerless.

Finally cancelled my subscription, paid the cancellation fee, because I have no other option. Sad.

Please, don't fall for it like me.

The gare stealing my money. Now I need to pay 500 euros just to stop being scam

The company I work for has had an account for over 12 years. And now a payment won't go through and there is no support. The support I did receive from Alex.G. was a bit rude and unhelpful. With comments like:
'Do you see the difference between 'help you over the phone' and 'take your payment over the phone'?
Nice manners there Alex. End result is no more Shutterstock account. Thankfully had no issues like this with Adobe Stock.

Several of my photos have been stolen by a shutterstock user and have been listed illegally and without permission of their site. Their legal team is ignoring my emails and proof of ownership and have failed to uphold their legal obligations and remove my work that has been stolen. The DMCA team are sickeningly ignorant and won't answer my question why they haven't taken my work off their horrid theft farm, vile site and are acting incredibly unprofessional and seemingly are encouraging content theft. Avoid this joke of a site at all costs, they encourage copyright violations and do nothing about them once reported with abundant evidence, crooks through and through.

I have been a Shutterstock customer for years and have never experienced such deceitful billing practices. I signed up for what I believed was a monthly plan to get a few pictures, but it turned out to be an annual subscription.

I was unknowingly charged for four months before I realized the mistake. When I tried to cancel, I was forced to pay half of the remaining annual subscription to shut off access.

These very shady and predatory terms were hidden deep within the agreement. I would never have signed up for this otherwise. I paid hundreds of dollars for just three pictures.

Future customers, please be careful! Nothing on this site is worth this kind of money and cancellation risk.

UNABLE TO CANCEL. After puchasing fixed-number of photos and then a month-to-month Shutterstock subscription it has become impossinble to cancel. I have been billed in error for the last three months. There is no chat, phone number, human or AI assistance. IT IS NOT THAT THE SUPPORT IS BAD, THERE JUST ISN"T ANY SUPPORT!

I paid £19 for 2 images, downloaded the first and was charged the £19, fair enough. Log on today, 10 days later, and my account shows 1 download still available. Downloaded this second image today and have been charged another £19. This happened once before and I thought I'd made a mistake but it seems not. This website has been designed to trip you up! I wish I had read all the reviews before using this website. Never again.

Took over PixelSquid, kicked me off my plan without warning, and jacked the prices up.

Misleading purchase terms, 3 figure cancelation for a subscription that I did not even want or agree too. The FTC needs to investigate these criminals. They knowingly and willingly misled a veteran owned business.