Pricing and business
Per-photo credits vs storage pricing: the maths of a wedding season
A photographer friend in Rajkot called me at 12:40 one night in December. He was halfway through uploading a 9,000-photo wedding when the app told him he was out of credits. The couple’s family was expecting the guest link in the morning. He topped up from his phone, at the full pack price, because there was no time to think.
The next day he sat down with his invoices and worked out what the season had actually cost him. It was a little over double what he had budgeted.
He wasn’t careless. Credit pricing just has a few multipliers that don’t show up until you’re deep into a busy month. So let’s do the maths properly, once, for a whole season.
The two ways photo-sharing apps charge
Per-photo credits. You buy a pack of credits. Each photo you upload uses some. When they run out, you buy more. Simple to understand, and it feels fair because you pay for what you use.
Storage plans. You pay a yearly fee for a fixed amount of space. You upload as many photos as fit. When you delete an old event, its space comes back for the next one.
SpotMe uses storage plans: Free with 10 GB, Standard with 500 GB for ₹17,000 a year, and Pro with 1 TB for ₹22,000 a year. Every feature is on every plan. I’m obviously biased, so I’ll try to show where credits genuinely win too.
The multipliers inside a typical credit plan
The headline credit price is rarely what you end up paying per delivered photo. These are the things to look for on any credit-based app’s pricing page. Not every app has all of them, but most have some.
Full resolution costs extra
A typical credit-based app counts a full-resolution upload as two or more credits, or keeps full resolution for a higher tier. If you deliver originals (and for the couple, you should), your effective credit use can double.
Re-uploads count again
The couple asks for warmer skin tones in the wedding folder. You re-edit 600 photos and upload them again. On most credit plans, those are 600 new uploads.
Caps on guests or face scans
Some plans limit how many guests can open a gallery, or how many selfie searches an event gets, and charge to raise the limit. A 500-guest wedding can hit a cap that was designed for a 150-guest corporate event.
Messaging fees
Some charge per OTP or per WhatsApp message sent to guests. Small per message, not small across 400 guests and 30 weddings.
A 30-wedding season, worked out
Let’s take a mid-sized studio in Gujarat:
- 30 weddings in the year
- 5,000 delivered photos per wedding on average, across all functions
- Full-resolution JPEGs at about 6 MB each
- About 10% of photos re-edited and re-uploaded after client feedback
On a typical credit plan
| Credits | |
|---|---|
| Photos delivered (30 × 5,000) | 1,50,000 |
| Re-uploads (10%) | 15,000 |
| Subtotal | 1,65,000 |
| Full resolution counted as 2 credits | 3,30,000 |
That is the number of credits you would need, before any guest caps or messaging fees. Take it to whichever credit app you’re considering and price it against their packs. Don’t compare the per-photo headline. Compare the season.
On a storage plan
Each wedding is about 5,000 × 6 MB, which is 30 GB. Re-edited photos only take extra space if you keep both versions, so delete the old ones and the total barely moves.
- If you keep every wedding for the whole year: 30 × 30 GB = 900 GB. That fits Pro, 1 TB, at ₹22,000 a year.
- If you delete each event six months after delivery: at any point you’re holding about 15 weddings, roughly 450 GB. That fits Standard, 500 GB, at ₹17,000 a year.
Storage on SpotMe is reusable. Delete a delivered event and its space comes back. No credits to rebuy.
Your numbers will differ. You can plug your own season into this:
We assume about 12 MB per edited JPEG.
Storage is reusable: once a couple has downloaded, delete the event and its space comes back.
Compare with a per-photo plan
Your SpotMe plan
Pro, ₹22,000 a year
About 703 GB online at your busiest, on 1 TB of reusable storage.
- Cost per wedding
- ₹550
- Same season, per photo
- ₹50,000
You keep ₹28,000 a year.
Where credit pricing genuinely wins
I said I’d be honest, so here it is.
Very small volume. If you shoot four weddings a year, a small credit pack may cost less than any paid plan. That said, our Free plan has 10 GB forever with every feature, which covers a small wedding or a couple of events if you export at sensible sizes, so try that before buying anything.
Huge files. If you deliver 40 MB TIFFs, storage fills fast and per-photo pricing starts to look better. Most wedding deliveries don’t need TIFF. A well-exported JPEG at 6 to 10 MB is full resolution and prints beautifully.
You never delete anything. If you want every event from five years ago live, storage keeps adding up. Most studios keep their own backup on hard drives and delete delivered events from the sharing app after a few months, which is what reusable storage is built for.
Side by side
| Typical credit plan | SpotMe storage plan | |
|---|---|---|
| What you pay for | Each photo uploaded | Space, yearly |
| Full resolution | Often extra credits or a higher tier | Same price, originals stored as uploaded |
| Re-uploading edits | Usually costs again | Uses space you already have |
| Guest limits | Sometimes capped | No guest caps |
| Face scans | Sometimes capped | No face-scan limits |
| OTP and WhatsApp fees | Sometimes charged | None |
| Busy month | Top up mid-wedding | Delete an old event, keep going |
| Predictable yearly cost | Hard | Yes |
Questions to ask any app before you pay
Whatever you choose, ask these. Get the answers in writing, or find them on the pricing page:
- Does a full-resolution photo cost more than a compressed one?
- If I re-upload an edited photo, is it charged again?
- Is there a limit on guests per event, or selfie searches per event?
- Are OTP or WhatsApp messages charged separately?
- What happens if I run out mid-upload?
- If I delete an event, do I get anything back?
My friend in Rajkot moved to a storage plan the following season, mostly because of question 5. He told me the money mattered less than never again being out of credits at midnight with a family waiting.
If you want to see the plans in full, they’re on the pricing page, and there’s a fuller season calculator. For setting your own package prices, see pricing wedding photography packages in India.
