A short guide
Delivering photos to clients, without the subscription tax
Five things to check before you pick a gallery host, then side-by-side comparisons with prices checked September 2026.
01
Decide what the gallery is for
If you sell prints through it, you need a store and a lab, and you should pay for one. If you deliver files and the client downloads them, everything past “upload, arrange, share” is a feature you're renting and not using.
02
Check what the free tier actually keeps
Free tiers shrink (Pic-Time drops from 10 GB to 3 GB after six months), cap downloads (CloudSpot serves 2048px on free), or take a cut of sales (15% on Pixieset and CloudSpot free plans). Read the plan page, not the homepage.
03
Ask what happens when you stop paying
Delivered galleries going dark after a lapsed card is the complaint photographers post most. The right answer is “nothing is deleted while you're inside the free tier.”
04
Ask whether your clients' photos train a model
Some hosts train internal AI on customer images, sometimes tied to a feature you switched on without reading the fine print. If the policy isn't a flat “never”, assume it isn't.
05
Price it per year, per gigabyte
Ten weddings a year is roughly 30 to 50 GB of JPEGs. Divide the annual price by the storage you'll really use. At that scale the difference between $36 and $96 is the cost of a lens filter, every year.
Side by side
Photobari vs Pixieset
If galleries are one feature among ten you'll use, Pixieset. If galleries are the whole job, Photobari costs a third as much for more storage.
Photobari vs Pic-Time
Pic-Time if you sell prints. Photobari if you deliver files and want the price and the storage to stay where they are.
Photobari vs CloudSpot
Like-for-like storage at less than half the price, with full-res downloads free. CloudSpot earns its fee only if you use the studio tools.
Photobari vs Google Drive and WeTransfer
Drive and WeTransfer move files. A gallery delivers a shoot. For a few dollars a year the difference is what the client remembers.