When you buy an image on Picster, a few things happen in sequence and it is worth knowing exactly what they are before you spend your first credit.
The purchase, the licence, and the file
Credits are the unit of exchange on Picster. One credit costs €0.15, and if you are paying in another currency — Australian dollars, British pounds, whatever — the price is converted from that Euro base at the live exchange rate at the time you top up. There are no subscriptions and no bundles that expire. You buy credits when you need them and they sit in your account until you use them.
When you spend credits on an image, you are buying a licence to use that file under the terms shown on the listing page. The licence is non-exclusive and covers the uses described — personal projects, commercial work, or both, depending on what the artist has set. Read those terms before you purchase. The transaction is one-time: you pay once and the licence does not expire.
Of the credits you spend, 50% go directly to the artist's Picster wallet. That is a flat rate across every sale on the platform, with no tiers or thresholds.
Re-downloading your files
Your purchase history is stored in your account. If you lose a file, accidentally delete it, or switch computers, you can return to your order history and download it again at no extra cost. You are not charged credits a second time. This is not a cloud storage service and we do not guarantee permanent archival, but in practice your files remain accessible in your account as long as the listing is active on the platform.
If an artist removes a listing or closes their account, that can affect availability, which is one reason it is sensible to save your downloaded files in your own backup as soon as you buy them.
How artists receive their money
On the artist side, earnings accumulate in an in-app wallet as sales come in. Payouts are not automatic — artists request a transfer from within the app when they are ready. This gives artists control over timing and means there is no minimum payout schedule imposed by the platform.
A few other things worth knowing about how the marketplace is structured:
- Picster uses a human-curated featured queue, so the images highlighted on the front page are chosen by a person, not purely by an algorithm or by who pays for promotion.
- There is no subscription on the buyer side either. Top up when you have a project, stop when you do not.
- Pricing across all listings is denominated in Euro at the source, so if you see a price in AUD or another currency it will shift slightly day to day with the exchange rate.
None of this is complicated once you have done it once. The short version: buy credits, spend them on a licence, download the file, re-download it from your history if you ever need it again. The artist gets half, immediately, and requests their payout when they choose.
