If you have looked at other stock or art marketplaces, you have probably seen the same pattern: a monthly subscription, a tier system, and a credit allowance that resets whether you use it or not. We went a different direction, and it is worth explaining why.
The basics of how credits work
Picster runs on a simple credit currency. One credit costs €0.15, and that is the base price — everything is denominated in Euro. If you are buying from Australia, Canada, or anywhere else, your local currency price is calculated from the live EUR exchange rate at checkout, so you are always paying the actual equivalent, not a rounded regional price baked in months ago.
You buy credits in a one-time top-up. There is no subscription, no auto-renewal, no monthly charge quietly hitting your card. When your credits run out, you top up again if you want to. If you buy a batch and use only half, the rest sit in your account until you need them. They do not expire.
This matters more than it sounds. A subscription model pressures you to download things you do not really need just to feel like you got your money's worth. A top-up model means you only spend when you have a real use for something.
How artists actually get paid
The commission split is flat: 50% of every credit transaction goes to the artist. There are no tiers where established sellers earn more and newer artists earn less. There are no exclusivity clauses that pay more if you pull your work from everywhere else.
When an artist earns from a sale, the amount lands in their Picster wallet. Payouts are requested directly inside the app — there is no waiting for an automated monthly batch if you would rather not wait, and no minimum threshold designed to hold small balances indefinitely. You request it, we process it.
The featured queue is worth mentioning here too. It is human-curated, not driven by who has the most followers or who pays for placement. That means a photographer who joined last month can appear alongside someone who has been on the platform for years, if the work is strong enough. It is not a perfect system, but it is a deliberate one.
Why one-time credits beat a subscription for most people
Subscriptions make sense if you are a design agency downloading fifty assets a week. For most buyers — someone decorating a home, a small business refreshing its website, a person who just wants one specific print — a subscription is a bad deal dressed up as convenience.
Here is what a subscription usually costs you:
- Money in months where you have no project
- The mental overhead of remembering to cancel
- A habit of downloading speculatively rather than intentionally
One-time credits cost you exactly what you use. For artists, that also means the pool of paying buyers is not limited to people willing to commit to a recurring charge. Someone can decide on a Tuesday that they want a print, spend €1.50 in credits, and that transaction goes through cleanly — half to the artist, the rest to keep the platform running.
We are a small team and we built what we would want to use ourselves. The credit system is the clearest example of that.
