Dreamstime, has altered its subscription plans to feature a monthly instead of daily quota of downloadable images, and is allowing the carrying over of unused downloads. The company says, “users will now effectively never ‘lose’ image downloads as unused downloads will roll over into the monthly quota amount, making Dreamstime the most convenient and flexible solution in the industry today.”
Previously, users that chose subscriptions of 30 days, three months, six months, or 12 months were limited to 25 or 50 downloads a day, up until they reached their subscription maximum. With this change, users that need a large volume of images quickly can flexibly choose their own number of daily downloads to best suit their individual needs.
"We're consistently looking at new ways to add value to our industry-leading image subscription service," said Serban Enache, CEO and co-founder, Dreamstime. "By adjusting our service to be based on a monthly instead of a daily quota, we allow users to pull images at their own pace. If they require a considerable number of images they can download as many as they need in a day, they no longer need to stretch them out over a longer period of time. We continue to offer a variety of subscription and credit plans that fit the needs and budget of individual users all the way up to bigger firms."
How Significant Is This Improvement?
The idea that users will “never ‘lose’ image downloads” isn’t entirely accurate. If a customer has a monthly subscription and only uses 500 of the 750 allowed within the 30 days the other 250 only carry over if the customer has “auto renewal active” and automatically pays for an additional month. In the new month the customer could potentially download 1000 images, but the instant the monthly subscription ends all unused downloads are lost.
While this is certainly an improvement over the previous system it still may not be as attractive for most users as Adobe’s new offering. While there may be occasional times when a user needs more than 25 images in a single day, there are probably very few times a single user needs more than 750 images a month.
With the Adobe model subscription plans start at $29.99 a month for 10 images instead of Dreamstime’s $239 for 750 images. If in a given month the customer doesn’t use all the images purchased the unused images are rolled over to the next month with a limit of 120 rollover images on account. If at any time the customer needs additional images they can purchase as many as they want, whenever they want, for $2.99 each.
Thus, if the total images used averages less than 79 a month or 959 per year the Adobe Stock offering will be a better financial deal. The other factor to consider is that a lot of the images the Dreamstime user is downloading may be used for design and planning purposes and never appear in a final released project.
Adobe allows users to download an unlimited number of Adobe Stock images, store them in its Creative Cloud and use them in the design development stage of their projects for no additional cost. The customer only pays for the images that actually appear in the end project. For many this will potentially be a huge savings.
Dreamstime, and other microstock distributors are trying to adjust their offering to better compete with Adobe, but they still may have a long way to go.