Whenever I wanted to buy stock images, I was shocked how expensive they were. I usually didn't intend to use them straight up commercially, but I felt like I should pay for somebodies work to produce these images. The prices were too steep though.
Unsplash was a God-sent. High quality images with only attribution requirements, which I was happy to give anyways. But Unsplash was bought by Shutterstock and became "kinda free" with the good stuff being paywalled. And now Shutterstock merges with Getty, two of the biggest players in the space.
Frankly, I am quite convinced this is bad for end-users. The space is already enshittified by all the AI junk. So I fully expect quality to go down and prices to go up after this merger.
Unsplash was a God-sent. High quality images with only attribution requirements, which I was happy to give anyways. But Unsplash was bought by Shutterstock and became "kinda free" with the good stuff being paywalled. And now Shutterstock merges with Getty, two of the biggest players in the space.
Frankly, I am quite convinced this is bad for end-users. The space is already enshittified by all the AI junk. So I fully expect quality to go down and prices to go up after this merger.