Big Stock Photo

This company is not in it for your long term business. All they want to do is have you forget that you put your credit card down for the service and then charge you. This is no warning that your subscription is over and that you will be charged. None at all! You are completely on your own. I emailed them only a couple days after I got charged and got this response:

When you enroll in a free trial or subscription plan, you are agreeing to pay the monthly fee until you cancel. The ability to cancel the plan is available to you at any time directly on your main account page.

And then this:

The issue is that you have been making licensed downloads on this account. We pay royalties to the artist for every license downloaded.

And then this:

To reiterate: when you enroll in a free trial or subscription plan, you are agreeing to pay the monthly fee until you cancel. The ability to cancel the plan is available to you at any time directly on your main account page.
Please note the following link:
https://www.bigstockphoto.com/tos.html
This is our Terms of Service. You will find under number this information under 4.) Subscriber Terms. It states specifically:
"It is the account holder's sole responsibility to manage the accounts, adhere to our Terms of Service, manage image licensing and review their bank statements for any discrepancies or unwanted charges."

If you believe this charge is unauthorized please feel free to contact your bank and we will provide necessary documentation.

Joseph T (customer care "advocate") was snarky beyond belief. Cancellation online is challenged 3 times - yes, I am sure i want to cancel. Do not assume clicking to cancel the autobill at the first or second menu is sufficient - it is not. Also, if you call them, it is not adequate to explain the situation... you must use the magic word "refund". I will never do business or refer business to any company that plays these semantic games.

I signed up with a free 7 day trial, and I had the worst experience. You'd think they would hook you on, but was set up for major disappointment. I was supposed to have 5 free photos a day for 7 days, ANY size, ANY picture but was unable to download anything! There was no fine print, but even the pictures I wanted, couldn't be offered because they were for "extended use only".
I contacted the customer support centre many times, and none of the instructions they offered helped much. I couldn't cancel my account, save photos, download them, logout, etc.
I think they should have offered an extension on the trial since I was unable to utilize their website, but when I cancelled with a live agent, none of them asked why or even bothered to keep me as a client.

I will definitely NOT recommend this BigStock Photo to anyone!

No mention of Three Day Period in TOS: https://www.bigstockphoto.com/tos.html

They auto Billed me, in the subscription Plan, before plan ended.And there is no mention of that in terms of service that i will be auto billed three day before.

They say a month is defined as thirty (30) consecutive days.
They will not intimate through email or SMS that you are going to be charged.

I 'm not Going to use it and i'm charged.

I will write a detailed Response, after i receive reply of my Email written to them.

---------------------------------------------------
Update is below:
-------------------------------
They replied to me, understood my point and Returned my money in 3 working days.

It seems they work in Good Faith.

I request them to send alerts prior to deduction from account.

As a business owner and owner of a design firm I can tell you that this company which is now owned by Shutterstock has THE WORST customer service and may cost you HOURS in photo research time. In all my years using stock photo companies I've found from personal experience that this one is very unprofessional in how they resolve download issues.

I've signed up for free trial, and chose $59 monthly plan. I was thinking 'maybe I would look around and find some good pictures.' I've used about less than 20 pictures, and... forgot to cancel. Well, I didn't mind paying for couple of months anyway. After paying $177 without using it, I've sent an email to cancel.
HOWEVER, THEY WOULD NOT LET ME CANCEL! DEMANDING ME TO PAY 12 MONTHS OF PAYMENTS. TOTAL WOULD BE $708!
I'VE NEVER HEARD OR SEEN OF SUCH PRACTICE IN SO MANY YEARS. 12 month contract makes sense when it comes down to rent an apartment, retail store loan, or business contract; at least these would have such paperwork and numerous places to sign to make sure you know what you are getting into. BIGSTOCKPHOTO does not! VERY SHADY. Unprofessional. Please, please use a different company. I mean there are thousands of others out there! I can't wait to call their manager on Monday to complaint. Thankfully I've used AMEX and they already blocked them!

I, too, signed up for 2 trials but canceled before they expired. However, the system is very unstable, had to do it multiple times on one of them yet still got billed, so I kept on using and successfully canceled after my first auto-billing was charged.

Ever since then, I try to use all my 10 tokens everyday but the webpage crashes constantly I had problems downloading 10 videos everyday. For instance, my re-downloads were counted as new downloads and lost my tokens to them. And when I write them about this issue, they blame me for my internet environment (ridiculous), and only compensated me the 2 tokens I asked for, valid for only a short period of time (in which hours we're in sleep here in my time zone). Therefore I never got to use the tokens lost, this went on for a couple days and in the end I said never mind I want to cancel my subscription and get money back, so they added 1 day on my subscription. I'm waiting to see if that's gonna hold up.

Seriously guys, don't use them! Go to other platforms! The free trial is sweet but make sure you cancel it before getting billed. It's not worth going through the hassle.

BigStock has great images and video for all kinds of projects, that's the good part. But here is the thing you need to pay attention to.

If you start off with a trail membership please understand that YOU WILL BE CHARGED 3 DAYS BEFORE YOUR MEMBERSHIP IS OVER! And you will be automatically started on whatever monthly plan you chose.

Also during your "trial" if you miss a day you do not get those downloads back. They do not roll over to the next day.

Also pay attention to their licensing policies! They have a standard license as well as an "editorial/Extended" license", which you have to pay additional fee for! So you may not be able to use the footage or images as you intended with out shelling out some extra money!

So all in all I think Bigstock provides excellent images and video, very professional stuff but again beware of the DEVIL IN THE DETAILS!

I should mention that I did have a great experience with customer service but your experience may or may not be the same.

Photos aren't great and the promos are a SCAM. I tried up for a trial and canceled it 2 days before the end. Sure enough they charged my card. When I contacted them to dispute it, they first denied I canceled it and only AFTER I was able to tell them that a banner overlayed my account page saying "Reactivate your subscription" did they agree to refund my money saying they charge the account 3 DAYS prior to the end of the trial so you don't "have interupted service". How nice of them... I guarantee there largest revenue stream is people who don't cancel their trial or don't pay attention to their bank statement (like 90% of Americans).

I'm a freelancer and I am kind of picky about my stock photos. I was very impressed with Big Stock Photo's selection and highly recommend you check them out.

My friend once signed up to use Big Stock Photo but he didn't have a credit card, so he used mine. He recommended I try it. I then filled in my information to try the 7 day free trial but it said I had used the trial before. I presumed this was because my credit card had been used by my friend. I therefore entered in my information again with a new credit card. I then got charged $79 without the free trial. So, I then emailed their customer service. The customer service then replied with this:

"Since you were already enrolled in a free trial, a second trial could not be utilized. If a user tries to enroll in a second free trial, the trial check-out page will state that we only provide 1 free trial per customer and will be charged for a paid plan if they continue. Before you proceed to sign up, the page specifies what plan you are getting. A copy of this page is attached for your review. Since you completed the purchase, this subscription was added to the account.
Under our Terms of Service subscription plans are non-refundable so we are unable to issue a refund for this agreed to month of subscription time. The auto-billing has been cancelled though so that when it ends on February 11,2020 at 1:38:14 AM EST your plan will simply end and not renew."

So even after I explained and asked for a refund they refused. This is extremely unreasonable. I haven't used their service at all yet, but they charged $79. When you sign up the page changed so little that it is not noticeable that the small writing has changed - so you cannot notice it. I canceled IMMEDIATELY and emailed then IMMEDIATELY to rectify the situation. If this is how BigStockPhoto.com runs their business then you should definitely STAY AWAY because they obviously try to trick their customers and then keep your money. I will now have to go to my credit card company to cancel the payment and show them the screen shots that say 7 DAY FREE TRIAL. If BigStockPhoto do not want to do the right thing for their customers then I have no choice but to leave this review wherever I can to teach people about their deceitful practices.

I have been trying for several days to cancel a bigstock trial subscription only to find out that I am locked in a 12 month subscription! I have emailed customer service and they say absolutely nothing can be done to cancel the subscription. I can not afford it and never wanted it, I DID NOT actively click on something which said "yes I want to have this subscription for 12 months"! I would not have ever done that. Does anyone know what I can I do to get out of it? Please can anyone help? Please? Including tax Bigstock photo is scamming me out of 46 pounds per month! I am a mum of two young boys, I can't afford this. Please beware of Bigstock photo.

Update - Thanks so much to Sitejabber and twitter! Had I not found your site and made this last ditch plea for help I honestly believe they would not have cancelled my subscription. They have sent me a message asking me to update my comment. They did in fact cancel my subscription thanks to Sitejabber! My new hero site. But now I am stuck to find awesome pics - I never had a problem with the pics they are top quality and I loved searching through them, I've used several on my site at cori mackin dot com and in my clients' sites. Like I said I am just a small startup so just need a few pics from time to time that don't cost the earth! Shame I can't use them anymore! Thank you again.

The free 7 day trial period is a scam, deceptive, and misleading! They tell you that you can cancel any time (which is true) and that they will only charge you after your trial period is over (this is a lie). They will charge you 3 days before your trial period is over. Their dishonesty is very disturbing.

When I found out that my credit card was charged before my trial period was over I tried to call them on the phone. When I called the number, it answered after I listened to a long recording about bigstock and then all I heard was static and some people in the background, then the phone just hung up. I then proceed to go to their live chat. I did get someone there and they cancelled my account and said I would get refunded in 3 days. I would give them 1 star if they weren't going to refund me.

Just know that they have a misleading 7 day free trial offer and if you are not careful you will end up paying for a month even if you intend to cancel before the 7 day trial is over.

Too bad, I thought I liked bigstockphoto.com after trying them out for a couple days, but once I saw them being dishonest, I didn't want to have anything to do with them anymore.