iStock Photo: An Isolated Issue or Bigger Trouble Ahead for the Dotcom 2.0 Companies

Lately, the company iStockphoto we’ve chosen for photos and art works to pair with our articles, has made fundamental changes to their pricing structure.

At this point, we can no longer justify using their service for our purpose.

Worse part of this change to their pricing plan is due to their operation based on pre-deposit credit. As a customer, we often pre-deposit money to them for credits to be applied to our purchases of stockphotos in the future. They have made a sudden increase in price once last year that essentially doubled the cost of getting a license for each photo from them. It is similar to a country devaluate their currency by 50% overnight knowing that their citizens will be badly burnt. It was bad but I can understand the need to restructure.

Now iStockphoto has done it again. This time they raised the price 10 times. Overnight, our remaining credits with them are turned into ashes.

To say the least, we are not very happy with the way we are treated. Their actions are no difference from outright theft. The amount of money we’ve deposited with them is not that much. It is a small loss but it shows that iStockphoto is no longer a company that can be trusted nor partnered with.

I wonder how many VC supported dot bomb 2.0 companies are doing this to keep their businesses going.

If iStockphoto is not an exception but the norm, the tech scene is definitely not as rosy as it seems.

Note: I’ve told my web staff to take iStockphoto out of our list of tools we use to build this site.

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