One time for my small business I shared a login with one of my employees and they tried to get us to buy some sort of Enterprise subscription because they claimed that dozens of IP addresses were logging into the account and when we refused they simply closed our account. We were paying like over $300 per month and not even using the full subscription limits... We ended up finding a cheaper solution and now just use AI images so yeah it was pretty dumb on their part.

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jaynate 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Who cares how much you paid? This doesn't seem predatory, you signed up for it and you violated the TOS.

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margalabargala an hour ago | parent | next [-]

It's not predatory, it's just Shutterstock being shitty. And in this case, self-destructive.

Shutterstock should care how much OP paid, because if they were paying a subscription and not maxing it out, Shutterstock lost money because they had a draconian TOS that they aggressively enforced to their own detriment.

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weird-eye-issue 36 minutes ago | parent [-]

Yes exactly it's not like it's unlimited downloads we had a fixed amount of images per month

	▲	s1artibartfast 11 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Why is number of images more 'real' than number of users? What is your strategy for all you can eat buffets?

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weird-eye-issue 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I didn't use the service. Well sometimes I would log in just to check they were actively using it and seeing which images were licensed to make sure they weren't using it for other purposes (remote employee). Only my one employee actually used it. I think she used a VPN which is why they thought dozens of people were using it apparently. Regardless the only loser in all of this was Shutterstock...

The only options they have is single seat or "talk to us" Enterprise level and for basically a one-person company using a virtual assistant we pretty much fall through the cracks there.