Client galleries · Bring your own storage

Your galleries. Your storage. Zero commission. Pay once.

Photographers pay $300–600 a year to rent hosting for photos that cost about $72 a year to store. Freehold is software you buy once. It publishes branded, password-protected proofing galleries to storage you own — and it keeps publishing them whether or not you ever pay us again.

Reserve a license View a live demo gallery

$149 launch license · 1 year of updates included · Reserving is free

Rent a gallery host: $300–600
Store 1 TB yourself: ~$72
Freehold, once: $149

The ledger

Five years of client galleries, entered both ways.

Same photographs, same clients, same five years. The only difference is whether you were leasing the shelf they sat on.

Leasehold

What you pay now

Pixieset-class plan$300–600/yr
Five years of it$1,500–3,000
Print commission~15% of sales
Storage capupgrade or delete
Your archivehostage when you stop paying

Five-year total

$1,500–3,000

Plus commission on every print sold.

Freehold

What you’d pay

Launch license$149 once
Your storage, 1 TB~$6/mo
Five years of it$360
Print commissionnone
Your archivein your bucket, yours forever

Five-year total

≈ $509

And you keep the galleries either way.

Storage figured at 1 TB on Backblaze B2 or Cloudflare R2, about $6 a month — and most galleries fit inside Cloudflare’s free tier, where the honest number is $0. Subscription range reflects typical published annual plans for Pixieset-class hosts on tiers a working photographer needs. Your own numbers will differ — the shape of them won’t.

How it works

Three steps, then you send one link.

Step 01

Point Freehold at your finals

Choose the folder of finished images for the shoot. No re-uploading them into someone else’s library.

Step 02

It builds the proofing gallery

Your branding, a password, watermarks on proofs, client favorites, and PIN-protected downloads.

Step 03

It publishes to your bucket

Straight to storage in your own account. You send the client one link, and the gallery is yours.

Not ready to run your own storage? Start on Freehold-managed hosting — live in a minute, priced at cost — and move everything to your own bucket later with one assisted click. Your clients’ links never break, and the galleries are yours either way. Clients send their picks and notes back through the gallery itself — no server involved, so the whole proofing loop works anywhere, forever.

Compared honestly

What you’re using now, and where it costs you.

Instead of

Pixieset, Pic-Time & co.

The bill never ends. Every year you pay again for galleries you already delivered.
They take a cut of print sales. Around 15% on work you shot, edited, and sold.
Storage caps. Upgrade the plan or start deleting client work.
Your archive is collateral. Stop paying and the galleries go dark — clients’ links included.

Instead of

Lightroom link sharing

It’s an Adobe page, not yours. Clients land somewhere that looks like your software vendor.
No watermarks on proofs. Finished files go out before anyone has paid for them.
No branding. Nothing carries your studio name into the client’s inbox.
No proofing workflow. No favorites you can act on, no download PIN, no delivery step.

Instead of

Self-hosted open-source galleries

Built for albums, not clients. They display photos; they don’t run a proofing job.
No favorites or download PIN. The selection-and-delivery loop is the part you actually need.
You become the sysadmin. Updates, backups, and a server to keep alive between shoots.
The polish is on you. Freehold is the same ownership, without the maintenance.

The license

Bought once, held outright.

Launch licenseNo. ____

$149One payment · 1 year of updates included

One payment. No subscription, no renewal, no invoice next year.
Unlimited galleries and unlimited clients, for as long as you shoot.
One year of updates included from the date of purchase.
Runs on your own Backblaze B2 or Cloudflare R2 bucket.
The license is perpetual. The version you buy stays yours.
Zero commission on print sales, now and in every later version.

Reserve a launch license

Reserving holds launch pricing and puts you at the front of the line when the first build ships.

Freehold is in development. There is no download yet, and we won’t pretend otherwise. Reserving is free and costs you nothing but an email. Deposits are refundable at any time, for any reason, by replying to us. We’ll email you about Freehold and nothing else.

See it working

The fastest way to judge this is to open a gallery.

A real Freehold proofing gallery, exactly as your client would receive it. Try the whole loop: favorite a few photos, add a note, hit “Send picks” — and open the link you’d get back as the photographer. Password: everafter.

View a live demo gallery