Free photos are great, but there’s still a chance you won’ be able to find exactly what you’re looking for. For example you might be looking for a photo of a particular rare item, or a picture of a person performing a specific task.
In this case, you’ll need to pay for the image, but some stock sites charge as much as $20 (or even more) for a single photo! Those kinds of prices may be fine for large websites that make six or seven figures, but they’re excessive for small websites that aren’t yet profitable.
Fortunately, there are stock photo sites out there that don’ charge so much, although many of them do require you to either purchase a monthly subscription or a pack of multiple credit rather than a single photo.
Because most people use quite a lot of photos in their business, it’s not a big deal to buy a package of credits. Even if it takes you a few months to use your credits, you will probably use them all eventually.
Let’s take a look at some of the best places to find stock photos at reasonable prices
Deposit Photos
Deposit Photos is one of the lease expensive stock photo sites, and they have a pretty wide selection of quality photos to choose from.
Their prices for photo packs are relatively expensive but if you join deal sites like Mighty Deals and AppSumo you can often get packages of 100 credits as low as $39 which is just 39 cents per photo!
You have to watch your email carefully after you sign u for the deal sites, because they only run these deals a few times per year. Fortunately, you can buy multiple packages if you use a lot of photos each year, so it’s a good idea to stock up on credits when they run the deal.
If you can’t wait for them to run one of their deals their subscription options are a much better deal than standard credit packages. If you use a relatively large number of photos, like you might if you blog regularly a subscription can save you a lot. With a subscription, you can get photos for $1 each, or even less with the larger subscription packages
iStockPhoto
If you need a photo that hasn’t been used on hundreds o other sites, iStockPhoto is a good choice. If you restrict your search to their premium images (known as the Signature Collection), you’ll find that most of them have not been overused the way images from other sites have been.
The main reason for that is price. Their exclusive photo are much higher priced than many other stock photo sites costing $20, $30, or even more for one image, and that doesn’t even cover an extended license, if needed.
But if you need a really good image, like for a book cover they are a good option.
99 Club
If you’re looking for very inexpensive images, you might want to consider the 99 Club from Stock Photo Secrets.
They have a database of 4,000,000 photos, and you only need to get a $99 one year subscription, which allows you to download 200 photos. If you need more photos after this, it is only $1 per photo. If you can’t snag one o the Deposit Photos deals, this is the next best option I know of.
There are tons of other options, but these are some o the best.