A lot of marketplaces ask contributors to hand over exclusivity, or they reward it with higher royalty tiers. The implied deal is: lock your catalogue here and we will make it worth your while. We think that is a bad trade for most artists, and we are not going to offer it.
How we actually make money together
Picster runs on a credit system. One credit costs €0.15, and that is the base unit everything is priced in. If a buyer is paying in Australian dollars or another currency, the price they see is converted from euros at the live exchange rate — no markup, no invented conversion fee. When a sale goes through, 50 percent of the credit value goes straight to your wallet. That split is flat. It does not change based on how many sales you have made or whether you also sell on other platforms.
Buyers top up their credit balance in a single purchase — no subscription, no auto-renew. They buy what they need and stop. That keeps the friction low and means the people spending credits on your work have actively chosen to do so.
When you want your earnings, you request a payout through the in-app wallet. We process it from there. No minimum tenure, no exclusivity condition attached.
What exclusivity would actually cost you
If we required exclusivity, we would be asking you to give up revenue from every other channel in exchange for exposure on one platform that is still building its audience. That is a poor calculation for almost any working photographer or illustrator. Your rent does not care which platform your print sales came from.
We are a small, independent marketplace. We do not have the catalogue volume or the marketing budget of the large stock agencies. Asking for exclusivity under those conditions would be taking something real from you in exchange for something speculative.
What we do ask for
We do curate. There is a human-reviewed featured queue, and not everything submitted gets placed in it. We look at technical quality, originality, and whether the work fits what buyers on Picster are actually searching for. Getting featured is not automatic, and that is intentional — it keeps the front of the catalogue useful rather than just full.
Beyond that, the expectations are straightforward:
- You hold the rights to what you upload or have the necessary permissions.
- The work meets our content guidelines.
- Metadata is accurate so buyers can find it.
That is the extent of what we need from you. Where else you sell is your business.
