Shutterstock Reviews 2,736

Terrible!! Terrible customer service, terrible practices, they auto charge you without properly notifying you or asking permisson, then they refuse to refund you. SCAM! I liked their images and would have used them again but definitely not anymore!!

wanted to charge 160 USD for canceling a subscription, what a bunch of scam crooks. When I asked PayPal to make sure I will not have any recuring subscriptions, they completely deleted my account from their site.

Scam! Stay away - they lure you in and charge u double for what u originally wanted.

You cannot trust this company. Im on my third time getting scammed. Today I bought a "2" Image license. They charged me twice even though I didnt authorize it. They bury an option for "Auto Refill" in the purchase. Im now being told it will be Atleast 48 hours until I get a refund. Im closing my account after this issue is resolved and reporting them to paypal.

Shutterstock is a Trap – Stay Away!

Shutterstock is one of the most deceptive companies I’ve ever dealt with. They lure you in with what seems like a good deal, only to trap you into an annual subscription without making it clear. And when you realize what happened? Too bad—you either pay a huge cancellation fee or keep paying for something you didn’t even want in the first place.

They know what they are doing in trapping customers in annual subscriptions and then having utterly ridiculous cancellation policies. I hope whoever set this company up has a serious look at themselves and assess if this is really how they want to make money is this world. They probably don’t care.

matthew virginia is ours

Charged £350 pounds to cancel a monthly subscription at £59 per month to download 50 images, we never signed a contract and when going to cancel they count up 12 months and make you pay 6 months cancellation charge. ShutterStock a total CON AVOID AT ALL COSTS. We paid them £59 per months for about 10 years and not once did we download 50 images. I've cancelled it paid the fee of they will just keep taking, other than cancelling the business debit card and seeing if they bother taking companies to court on this Foreign none UK SCAM scheme they have going on here AVOID

They used the excuse "At Shutterstock we are committed to protecting your personal information. We have detected some irregular activity on your account. As a precaution, the password for account *****@g****il.com has been reset." to ask me to change my password many times by sending spam like that continuously, a fuc**ng spam mail service, please do not register an account at this website.

They are literally the worst and are obviously trying to trap the users to get in to the annual subscription and where you realise you don't have any choice! You need to pay a huge amount of money for canceling what they forced you to buy!

Do this people even read this? Seriously rip-off of the service and when you try to cancel, they rip you off again. I am speechless! At this point it should be called Shitterstock

I am yet another person who thought I was paying per month and got trapped into a year’s plan that I cannot cancel.

The most corrupt entity ever existed. Paid for 750 pictures and saved the ones I needed for 3 projects. I came back to my account few months after and there is absolutely nothing saved. They got rid of almost 600 pictures I`ve saved and paid for and now they are asking me to pay again.
DO NOT USE THIS ROGUE COMPANY

I was not able to pay with debit card on the webpage, it just didn't work and I never had any problem with this card on any other webpage. I had to buy 2 photo packages as individual transactions ( can't you just enable quantity buy?) on my Android phone through Google Play to make it happen and now I have Invoice in GBP with personal address as private individual, paid with business card and Invoice in USD with my company address available in my profile on Shutterstock website. Then I used online chat which closed session as I was typing!
What an unprofessional mess. My first and last transaction with Shutterstock.

Incredibly exploitative automated billing system. I will refuse to use again for that reason alone, despite the fact that I would have gladly paid three times the amount charged for the image that I needed.

Adding my voice in the hope that these dishonest people go bust. I'm yet another mug who was tricked into the so-called annual plan - 2 images for £22.80? Auto-renew sneaked on without my noticing? I don't think so! There are MUCH better image companies out there who don't rip you off.

Note for UK-based (and hopefully others) - my bank was able to block Shutterstock for 13 months. This gives me the option to delete my account once the payment date has safely passed.

If they want to come to my house and ask for the money – yes please!

My VAT number was filled correctly and they charged the VAT at payment time in contradiction with the EU laws and the payment was displayed without tax before the checkup. They also refuses to refund the VAT that has been illegaly charged. That's a pretty disgusting company to work with.

THIS IS CRAP WEBSITE!!!!!!!!!!!!
I wanted to buy 1 month subscription for about 35 dollars and I Ended up paying almost 200 dollars for using their service for about 10 minutes.

I wanted to buy 1 month subscription for about 35 dollars. Ended up paying almost 200 dollars for using their service for about 10 minutes.

I was billed about 35 dollars and it said monthly payment.So I figured I was buying the correct subscription model.
After downloading 4 images I canceled my subscription and was billed another 150 dollars - because I apparently had paid for a yearly subscription.

Contacted customer support - they said that they couldn't help me.

Googling it revealed that many people had the same experience.

ABSOLUTE THIEVES.
I hope that AI puts them out of business because they trap you in their subscriptions and when you try to cancel they charge an insane amount of money which btw is called theft when you have to pay an insane amount to get out of a subscription.