What One Stock Download Actually Pays

Ask what a stock agency pays and you get a percentage: 33% here, 40% there, 60% if you go exclusive. Those numbers are real, and they are also close to useless on their own. A 40% royalty at Shutterstock can pay ten cents. A 33% royalty at Adobe can pay ninety-nine. A 30% royalty at Pond5 applies to a price you set yourself. This is what one download actually pays across the major agencies, and why the percentage is the least important part of the answer.

Every figure below is from the agency's own contributor documentation, linked at the end. Where an agency does not publish a number — and several deliberately do not — we say so instead of estimating.

The headline percentages

Read that table the way most contributors do and Dreamstime exclusivity at 60% looks like it pays six times what Adobe pays at 33%. It does not. The percentage is applied to a number that varies by a factor of fifty depending on how the customer bought.

Why the percentage is not the payout

There are three separate mechanisms at work, and every contributor confusion about "why did this sale pay so little" traces back to one of them.

1. The percentage is a share of the net price, divided by the plan

Adobe publishes the arithmetic openly, which makes it the clearest example on the list. Its own worked case: a plan costs US$29.99 a month for 10 photo licences, so the royalty is US$29.99 ÷ 10 photos × 33% = US$0.99 per licensed photo. The rate is applied to the US purchase price after any discount, and rounded up to the nearest cent.

That is the honest shape of subscription stock everywhere. A customer on a large plan pays very little per file, so a high percentage of very little is still very little. Shutterstock says the same thing in different words: the amount you earn is a percentage of the price paid for that licence, and the price varies with the customer's plan.

2. Floors and flat rates override the percentage entirely

This is the part almost no comparison article mentions, and it is the single most useful thing on this page.

• Shutterstock has a $0.10 floor.Its help centre is explicit: "$0.10 is the minimum payout per download, regardless of level", and it happens whenever your percentage share would come out below that. It also states that large packs can price downloads as low as $0.20–$0.30 for the customer. Do the arithmetic — at $0.25 a download, a contributor at the top 40% level earns exactly ten cents, the same as a beginner at 15%. Reaching level six does not remove those sales. It only adds better ones alongside them.
• Depositphotos replaces the percentage on subscriptions. Pack downloads pay 30% to 38% of the file price, but subscription downloads pay "a fixed royalty rate between $0.25 and $0.33 per file". Your level does not enter into it.
• Vecteezy's free tier pays per thousand.Free content earns $5 per 1,000 downloads for photos and vectors, and $10 per 1,000 for video. That is half a cent and one cent per download respectively. Pro content is a different business entirely: revenue minus card fees, split 50/50, then divided by each subscriber's download mix — Vecteezy's own example gives $1.97 for three files downloaded by one $14/month subscriber.

So the real spread on a single download, using only published figures, runs from half a cent to about two dollars. No percentage in the first table predicts where you land in that range.

3. On Pond5, you set the number the percentage applies to

Pond5 is structurally different and it is worth understanding before comparing its 30% to anyone else's 40%. Artists set their own prices, including exclusive artists, who keep full pricing control. Non-exclusive artists earn a 30% revenue share; exclusive video artists earn 40%. Music, sound effects, photos, illustrations and After Effects projects sit at 30%, and dataset licensing earnings are 20%.

A clip you price at $80 pays $24 at 30%. The same clip inside a subscription pays a fraction of that. Pricing power is the variable Pond5 gives you that nobody else on this list does — which also means a badly priced portfolio is your own doing there in a way it is not elsewhere.

The ladder, and the part that resets

Four of these agencies run level systems. They are not the same kind of ladder, and one of them is a treadmill.

Shutterstock: six levels, reset every January

There are six earnings levels for images and six for video, and you climb them independently based on licences in each category:

The crucial detail is the reset: every contributor drops back to level 1 on 1 January, every year, no matter how long they have been contributing. Shutterstock's stated reasoning is that it wants to reward content performing well now rather than tenure. The practical effect is that January and February are the worst-paid months of every year, and the rate applied to a sale is whatever level you were on at the moment it happened. A portfolio that earns 40% in December earns 15% a week later.

Dreamstime, Depositphotos and 123RF: levels that hold

• Dreamstime runs contributor levels 0 to 5 with non-exclusive files at 25% and exclusive files at 27.5%, while contributors who go fully exclusive move to a 60% revenue share and earn a $0.20 bonus per approved submission.
• Depositphotos raises the pack-download rate from 30% to 38% as lifetime downloads climb through its level bands — but, as above, that ladder does not touch subscription income at all.
• 123RF publishes a 30% to 60% range that rises with your total sales volume.

Alamy changed the deal on 1 September 2026

If you contribute to Alamy, or stopped and still have a balance there, this is the most consequential recent change on this page. Alamy's published contract changes, effective 1 September 2026:

• A four-tier structure replaces the old two tiers, banded by annual licence fees: Bronze under US$250, Silver US$250 to $3,000, Gold US$3,000 to $25,000, and Platinum at US$25,000 and above for exclusive content only.
• New contributors now start at Silver, not Gold. That is a straight reduction for everyone joining after that date.
• The payout threshold rose from US$50 to US$75, and the termination payout from US$15 to US$30.
• The revenue year moved from 1 July to 1 September, so the window your tier is measured over has shifted.
• AI-generated content is now a material breach of the contributor contract, not merely disallowed.

Alamy's contributor terms state it pays "up to 50% of a direct sale" and keeps the per-tier percentages in a separate commission table, published as an image rather than text — so check the table itself for your tier rather than trusting any figure quoted second-hand, including a summary like this one.

Getting paid: thresholds and timing

The last mechanism that decides what a download is worth to you is whether the money can leave the platform. A cent earned at an agency whose threshold you will never reach is not income.

A $100 threshold at 25% on subscription-priced files is a genuinely long wait for a small portfolio. This is the argument for concentrating effort on two or three agencies rather than spreading thinly across nine — not that the thin ones pay badly per file, but that the money sits stranded below the line.

What this means for where you put your files

1. Compare payout per download, never the percentage. The only two agencies here that publish a directly comparable per-download figure are Adobe (its $0.99 worked example) and Depositphotos (its $0.25–$0.33 subscription band). Everything else has to be measured from your own statements.
2. Expect the floor sales. Ten-cent downloads at Shutterstock and half-cent downloads on Vecteezy Free are not malfunctions, they are the published terms. Volume is the only thing that makes them add up.
3. Price the exclusivity trade properly. Dreamstime exclusivity more than doubles the rate, Pond5 exclusivity adds ten points and keeps your pricing control, and Getty exclusivity is a much larger commitment — we worked through that specific decision in Getty vs iStock.
4. Remember January. If a meaningful share of your income is Shutterstock, your annual earnings are not evenly distributed and never will be.
5. Count the threshold before adding an agency. Ten files on a ninth platform will earn something. It will just not arrive.

None of this changes the one thing fully inside your control: whether buyers find the file at all. A download that never happens pays zero at every royalty rate on this page — which is why metadata quality, not rate-shopping, is where most portfolios have room to move. If you are deciding where to publish rather than what a download pays, we compared the agencies themselves in the best stock photo sites to sell on, and the footage-specific requirements are in stock video specs and metadata across nine agencies.

Sources & further reading

• Adobe Stock — Royalty rates for contributors
• Shutterstock — How much will I be paid as a contributor?
• Shutterstock — Why am I still seeing $0.10 earnings at higher levels?
• Shutterstock — Contributor earnings structure FAQ
• Pond5 — Payout overview
• Alamy — Contributor contract changes (effective 1 September 2026)
• Alamy — Contributor commission table
• Depositphotos — How much can I earn per download?
• Dreamstime — Contributor-related questions
• Vecteezy — Free vs Pro content and how each pays
• 123RF — Commission structure
• Getty Images — Contributor royalties guide