SmugMug Raises Pro Acount Prices by $100…No, Really!

by Gevon Servo on 09/01/2012

So, this morning, I woke up to a shocking email. SmugMug was increasing its pro accounts by $100 USD for my next renewal. The reason is storage cost. Many are complaining as I type this. I am not happy myself. I was actually attempting to take my photography beyond the hobby phase. I had been building my business model around SmugMug and its pricing. Many photographers find this price increase too drastic and shocking. Hundreds of complaints have flooded in and Smugmug has handled it well so far.  For SmugMug they run the risk of alienating a lot of newer photographers due to the fact that there are lower cost options available.

What do you think of the cost increase?

The basic details are as follows (To read more take a look at their site here )

*Pros who sell at a markup use far more storage and features than pros who don’t, so we split our pro account into two types: Portfolio and Business.

*After October 14- Portfolio is $150/year or ($20/mo) and still provides access to our pro labs for both you and your visitors, plus pro-features like watermarking.

*After October 14- Business will be $300/year (or $35/mo) for new customers, but existing subscribers who set prices will be asked to renew at $250/year (or $30/month) .

 What will I be charged when/if I renew?

If your anniversary date is before October 15, no worries, you’ll renew at our existing rates.

  • After October 14, we’ll guess you’d like to renew at the Portfolio rate if you aren’t setting prices.
  • Also after October 14, we’ll guess you’d choose to renew at the Business rate of $250/year (or $30/month) if you do set prices.

SmugMug’s Pro Pricing Change: What, Why and How.


This increase in price gave me a lot to think about. I am now considering alternatives such as Zenfolio or Pictage. I would like to maintain a low bottom line until I can increase my photography income. If I do stay with SmugMug I will lower my account to portfolio. Many people are making this same decision today. SmugMug is a great service, but this sudden increase hurts.

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Tagged as: business, News, Photography, portfolio, pro, pro photographers, selling images, sharing, shooting, Smugmug

  • Iris
  • Iris

    Sorry for the unclosed link…

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/George-Dyne/1233590792 George Dyne

    I was made redundant 3 years ago and spent my time chasing a dream by going to college and studying my passion -photography. I have just started my business and looking to reap the rewards. Having just setup my Smugmug pro-site I am disgusted at the price hike. Which is above my means. So I reduced it to a basic account, will do the business side myself until I move to another provider very soon. After the backlash I dont expect they will have a smug mug after all.

  • Paparexi

    I too am bummed about the increase. I make very little money a year from selling photos, surely not enough to cover the extra $100. If I was wedding photog this would just be the price of doing biz- but I ‘m not. Smugmug is rum by photogs for photogs, they return all my email inquiry’s the same day. Still an awsome company but this upgrade will prob force me to do the pro level where I can’t increase the prices… Paparexi.com BTW your reviews are awsome and I think I am going to purchase the speedlight beauty dish with Gary Fong modifier you reviewed last week. Thanks!

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  • Diana Sainz

    Smugmugs price increase helped me make a decision I was already toying with! Like many I will be leaving smugmug! They are not worth the increase at all! Shame on them! Way to drastic! I let them know too!

    • CATFACE T-SHIRT

      holy cow in the time you’ve been posting this all over the internet you could have made $100 in photo sales and taken the holiday off

  • David Thomas

    I am a professional and have been with SmugMug for some time. If you are using SmugMug to sell your product, you will have to go with their Pro account because the basic account will only allow you and your customers to purchase prints at cost. You can’t markup pricing to your customers now at that level. You only get at-cost pricing and watermarking of your images which is not very useful for someone trying to make income with photography.

    Their rationale for drastically increased prices, they say, is to provide better services in the future for their customers. I think they got it wrong. Why should loyal customers, who have made SmugMug the successful company that they are pay in advance for “Promised” services they may or may not be able to deliver?

    Either SmugMug hasn’t done a good job of thinking this through or there is more to this then they are telling us. The people that this really hurts,( i.e. those doing part-time photography or those really struggling to make ends meet) is the smaller customer because they will find it difficult to absorb the price increase. And frankly, these people don’t use that much of SmugMug’s bandwidth and storage anyway. It’s the established pros and video providers who are allowed to upload unlimited numbers of high-res images and HD video which takes massive bandwidth and storage. Why isn’t SmugMug charging those users a premium because they use more resources than others who use less resources but still need the ability to have the ecommerce use of SmugMug?

    I’m one of the lucky ones because my renewal date is in less than two weeks, so I can get another year at the existing rates. But I’m really annoyed and disturbed how this was thrown on loyal SmugMug users so I’m not likely to renew with them. There are plenty of other companies that provide similar and even better solutions than SmugMug before their outrageous price increase. Several postings have said Zenfolio has been more than happy to give new customers a 20% discount to former SmugMug users. I’m sure SmugMug’s competition is having a field day with their recent news.

    In the end, you need to determine what level of service you need and do you buy into smugMug’s promise of future improvements which you are paying for in advance.

    My feeling is that for a company to make such as drastic price increase, which they must have known would infuriate their existing customer base might indicate these possibilities:

    The McAllester family has gotten greedy.
    The company is heading for financial trouble.
    They don’t want to deal with the small customer because they don’t generate enough revenue so they are changing their business model to provide a higher revenue stream.

    Whatever is going on behind the scenes, if you are using SmugMug now or in the future, you might want to make sure you have your original material saved somewhere other than on their servers. If you don’t you might want to consider downloading to a safe place in case the family-owned company becomes a thing of the past as so many others before them. From your SmugMug gallery go to Tools drop-down, This Gallery, Download All setting to save your pictures to your hard drive.

  • http://wingtangwong.com/ Wing Wong

    I got the same email. Been with SmugMug for years. It kinda makes me sad, because I really like their service. I’ve tried out alternatives and in the end, have come back to SmugMug. But this time, I’m afraid I’ll have to say ‘no’, when my renewal comes up. Thankfully, mine is good till next year, as it just renewed.

    Some thoughts about SmugMug’s pricing model/business model:

    The price hike is most likely to counter the cost of LARGE archives of images that pros and non-pros alike are using. Remember, every image below 50MB will be stored in SmugMug’s storage systems. Anything above will be stored in an SmugVault ala AmazonS3 on the user’s dime. With larger and larger MP cameras creating image files in the 10-20MB range, that is eating into their storage like crazy.

    With video hosting, that is accelerated even more. So, with a good chunk of space being sucked up by the <50MB range, and perhaps not enough people actually making sales, they have to bump up the price. That $100 bump represents an increase in storage capability of 83GB per account or 1TB of storage a year, more or less.

    Judging from many galleries, most people don't delete. I mean… why bother, right? Long lived galleries represent long tail sales of images. And since the storage doesn't cost us, we just leave it. But that long term storage is a continual cost and overhead for SmugMug. At first, it wasn't so bad as they could stay ahead of the curve. But when people start to upload massive amounts of data to them, staying ahead of the curve becomes a problem.

    The problem is that their success depends on their ability to have cheap storage and a user base with a predictable and manageable storage consumption curve.

    I recently did an audit of my SmugMug storage needs. The footprint works out to about 24GB of images from the years I've been with SmugMug. I love the service, but I'm afraid I'll be leaving. For the money I'm paying SmugMug, I can host around 166GB of images each month through similar channels and backend mechanisms.

    Features I love about Smugmug:
    - great upload support
    - nice to have multiple resizes
    - nice to have archive of original raw
    - nice to get watermarks
    - nice to have votes, comments, and exif data support
    - keywording and tagging
    - backend support and great purchasing interface to printing labs.
    - awesome to have a dedicated and passionate team.

    Features Still lacking about SmugMug:
    - social
    - easy complete collection archiving

    With the exception of the dedicated and passionate team and the interface to the printing labs, I can acquire the other technical functionality elsewhere.

    I hope SmugMug can work out the overhead and income stream curve issues. But before my next renewal date, I expect to be migrated off of my SmugMug Pro account.

  • FromTheCapitol_com

    This SmugMug was trying to dump the small time pros. They did not realize they would be pissed and start an eriot.

  • Wagner

    they are too volatile in their pricing. even if they revert to old prices you know they have it in them to do this again and again. everybody, cancel your accounts and leave this greedy unscrupulous company!!

  • http://www.facebook.com/allen.pendergast Allen Pendergast

    That sucks! You should check out http://www.SImplyStudio.com . They have all that pictage does and a ton of other features. I’ve been using it for about 3 months now and there is no comparison. Enjoy…. Alan

  • blackshadow

    I was a long time pro Smugmugger and when they put their prices up it forced me to do a rethink about my online presence and for that I’m thankful.

    To see why have a read of http://blackshadow.com.au/2012/10/thank-you-smugmug/

    I ended up with a WordPress + Photoshelter solution that is working much better for me.

  • Seth Ellis

    Greetings All. I’m a hobbiest photographer and have been using Smugmug for about 7 years. I’m astonished that they have not raised prices for their pro accounts before this as file sizes and video uploads have gobbled up storage like a starving Pac-Man minus the ghosts.

    I’m also astonished at all the whining I hear about the price increase–especially from pros who use this as the front end for their business. They will spend thousands of dollars per year on new equipment but don’t want to spend $300 for their online image and sales channel. I basically break even every year with Sugmug because it’s a hobby. If this were my business, $300 per year would be a very worthwhile business expense. Consider the services offered and that the competitors offering the same professional features are price comparable. And instead of whining, discover how you can leverage the offered features to make more sales and think about how short sighted it is to not have a business model that accounts for inflation. Just my .02.

  • Seth Ellis

    Greetings All. I’m a hobbiest photographer and have been using Smugmug for about 7 years. I’m astonished that they have not raised prices for their pro accounts before this as file sizes and video uploads have gobbled up storage like a starving Pac-Man minus the ghosts.

    I’m also astonished at all the whining I hear about the price increase–especially from pros who use this as the front end for their business. They will spend thousands of dollars per year on new equipment but don’t want to spend $300 for their online image and sales channel. I basically break even every year with Sugmug because it’s a hobby. If this were my business, $300 per year would be a very worthwhile business expense. Consider the services offered and that the competitors offering the same professional features are price comparable. And instead of whining, discover how you can leverage the offered features to make more sales and think about how short sighted it is to not have a business model that accounts for inflation. Just my .02.

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