A Pixsy alternative for businesses, not catalogues

Where the two models differ

• Built around

  A catalogue of images, monitored over time

  A website, scanned at a point in time

• Covers

  Images

  Images and the writing on your pages

• Commercial model

  Subscription tiers, plus a commission on recoveries

  No subscription. A per-URL fee, charged only when a page comes down

• Goal of a case

  Removal, or a licence fee recovered

  Removal

• Best for

  Photographers, illustrators, stock licensors

  Ecommerce sellers, service businesses, content publishers

The question that decides it

Ask yourself what the copied material is worth and how you would want that value realised.

If your images have a licence price

A stock photographer, a commercial illustrator, anyone who sells usage rights. An unlicensed use is a sale someone did not make. Recovery is the right goal, and a recovery-led service is the right partner. That is Pixsy’s territory and we would send you there.

If the copy is costing you customers

An ecommerce seller whose product photos and descriptions now sit on a competitor’s store. A service business whose site copy was lifted wholesale. Here the damage is not a missed licence fee, it is a competitor trading on your work and, often, your pages competing against themselves in search results. Removal is the whole point. A settlement does not fix it.

If it is both

Then they are not alternatives and you may genuinely want both, in sequence: get it down first, then take advice about whether the use was worth pursuing for value.

That is the honest division, and it is not a close call in most cases. The reason this page exists is that the two problems look identical from the outside — “someone is using my images” — and they are not.

Why we do not charge a subscription

Content theft, for a small business, is usually an incident rather than a condition. You find out, it is infuriating, you want it dealt with, and then for a long while nothing else happens. A monthly fee is a poor fit for that shape of problem, and a monthly fee that has to be cancelled afterwards is worse.

So we do it the other way round. The scan is free and ungated — you see every result without an account or a card. If you decide to engage us, you are quoted per URL before anything is filed, the price is frozen at that quote, and the invoice is only raised for pages that actually come down. Nothing recurring, nothing to cancel.

There is a real limitation in that model and it is only fair to name it: because we are paid on removal, we have an incentive to take the cases most likely to succeed. We tell clients when a target looks unlikely — an offshore host with no designated agent, a site behind a service that ignores notices — rather than taking the fee and the disappointment.

What neither of us can promise

Whichever you choose, hold both of us to the same standard on this.

• ✓Nobody can guarantee removal. The host decides. A notice obliges a host that wants § 512 safe harbour to act expeditiously, but obligation is not the same as certainty, and some hosts simply do not care about safe harbour.
• ✓Nobody controls the timeline. Of all the recipients whose policies we have read, exactly one publishes a target response time, and it describes it as an aim.
• ✓Removed content can come back. A counter-notice under § 512(g) puts it back in ten to fourteen business days unless a court action is filed. That is the statute working as designed, not a failure.
• ✓The other side usually finds out who complained. Several hosts and marketplaces forward the whole notice, contact details included.

If any service tells you otherwise, that is the thing to question — not the price.

What to have ready, either way

Whichever service you use, the same four things decide how smoothly a case runs, and none of them is something a service can produce for you.

• ✓Proof that you own it. Original files, camera raws with EXIF, layered source files, or the written assignment if a freelancer made it. If someone else created the work and never assigned the copyright to you in writing, you may not be the right person to file.
• ✓A date. A public archive capture of your page as published is the single most useful record, because the other side can verify it without having to trust you. Submitting your own URLs to the Wayback Machine costs nothing and takes two minutes.
• ✓The specific URLs. Not the copier’s homepage. Every recipient we have read requires the exact page, and several say in terms that a site-level link will be rejected.
• ✓A decision about fair use. Commentary, criticism and news reporting are real, and a notice sent without considering them is the fact pattern that produces § 512(f) problems.

A client who arrives with those four is cheaper and faster to act for than one who does not, and that is true at any firm.