My Account & Billing

The following is intended to serve as a general description of our billing practices. For the official terms of your relationship with PhotoShelter, please see our Terms & Conditions of Use.

Services & Products

Any charge made to your PhotoShelter account will fall under one of the following categories:

Subscription fee (Starter, Basic, Standard, Pro, or Multi-User), each of which has varying storage allocations and feature access. These are billed monthly or annually, depending on your preference.
Storage add-on: supplemental storage that may be tacked onto any subscription
Transaction fee: a percentage (10% for paid subscribers, 30% for Starter account holders) of anything you sell through PhotoShelter's shopping cart (or instant sale)
Bandwidth, which is only charged ($1 for every 1GB of overage) when you exceed your monthly allocated volume. Your monthly usage is displayed in real-time on your Image Statistics page.
Sales activation fee, which is a one-time charge of $50 that applies only to Starter and Basic account holders if they choose to activate their account's ecommerce functionality
Labor: assessed only upon your formal request of a one-off PhotoShelter service, such as a hard drive upload, custom website design, or data recovery

Bill Date & Monthly Statements

Your Bill Date
PhotoShelter bills you, the account holder, monthly on your "bill day". Typically, your bill day is the day of the month that you created your account, but in cases where the account is created toward the end of the month (for example, August 31st,) we will default your future bill days to being the last day of the month (in this example, September 30th).

For subscription fees, your bill day indicates the beginning of a new term of service. For example, if your account is billed monthly and your bill day is June 15th, you are paying for service through July 14th of that year.

Even if you choose an annually billed subscription, we will still generate a monthly statement if you have accrued any charges within that month, such as transaction fees or exceeded bandwidth.

Your next bill date is available in your Account Info section. For annually billed accounts, we will send an email reminder 30 days in advance that your account is queued to auto-renew.

All of your past statements are displayed on your Statements page.

Proration & Credits
When upgrading or downgrading your account or changing the billing term, credits and charges are prorated at the time of purchase. More specifically:

Upgrades

When upgrading your monthly account from one tier to another (i.e. monthly Basic to monthly Standard), a prorated credit for unused time from the lower account is applied.
When upgrading your annual account from one tier to another (i.e. annual Basic to annual Standard)
When upgrading your account tier and changing your term from monthly to annual (i.e. monthly Basic to annual Standard), you will be billed for 11 months at the new rate plus however many days are remaining before your next bill date; a credit for unused time in the original tier will also be factored into the rate.

Downgrades

When downgrading your monthly account from one tier to another (i.e. monthly Standard to monthly Basic), we will issue a prorated credit to your account for the unused time.
When downgrading your annual account from one tier to another (i.e. annual Standard to annual Basic), your account will remain at the original subscription level through the duration of the paid term, at which point it will automatically downgrade to the lower tier.
When downgrading your account tier and changing your term from annual to monthly (i.e. annual Standard to monthly Basic), your account will remain at the original subscription level through the duration of the annual term, at which point it will automatically downgrade to the selected tier, and the term will be converted to monthly.

Term Changes

When changing your term but keeping your subscription tier the same (i.e. monthly Standard to annual Standard), your account will a convert to the new term at the end of the period for which you have already paid.

Billing Expiration & Failures

PhotoShelter accounts allow the user to input a maximum of 2 credit cards: one (required for all paid accounts) in the Billing Info section, the other (required only for those who choose to activate their accounts for ecommerce) in the Sales Configuration section.

When the main (Billing Info) credit card is declined, your account immediately enters a lockout state, which does not affect your service but will require you to enter your card info before you may access your PhotoShelter account. After the account has been in lockout for 14 days, the following actions will be taken:

Homepage and image display pages are temporarily disabled
Cart checkout is disabled; no buyers will be able to purchase your images
Any presence you may have had on the PhotoShelter homepage (e.g. featured images slideshow or "Recently Updated") is hidden

If no new billing info is entered for 3 months, your account will enter a freezing and de-privileging process that will eventually result in account termination.

When the Sales Configuration credit card is declined, this means that a sale has been made that requires automated fulfillment for one or more of the items in the order, and we were unable to charge your card for the wholesale printing cost. We will immediately notify you of the sale made and will temporarily freeze your sales configuration such that no further sales can go through until a current card is entered.

When either card is due to expire, we will send numerous account reminders (if necessary) by email in an attempt to avoid any service interruption. Email notifications will continue throughout the lockout process in an effort to keep you abreast of any changes to your account.

Cancellation

If you choose to cancel your account, your account will remain fully active through the end of the paid term. There are no refunds given for unused time.

When an account enters full cancellation, the following actions will take place:

Sales configuration is deactivated
The user's PhotoShelter homepage is temporarily redirected to http://photoshelter.com but is eventually deleted in full
All images are deleted (after a 90-day grace period)