😱 I Almost Lost $50,000 Worth of Stock Photo Licences in One Afternoon

A few years ago, a routine login failure nearly cost me $50,000 in proof that I had the right to use the content my agency had shipped to clients. It was my sisu with contracts that protected the business, and my sloppiness with backups that almost sank it. The workaround I hacked together in a panic eventually became the seed of a service I launched this month. If you run a studio, an agency, or a content shop that rents stock by the thousand, this one is going to feel uncomfortably familiar.

Hi, my name is Tom Smykowski, I'm a staff full-stack engineer. I build and scale SaaS platforms to millions of users, working end-to-end from system architecture to frontend to mobile. On this blog I write about the quiet operational disasters every studio, agency, and small SaaS eventually has to survive, and the small tools I build to keep them survivable.

The agency years

A few years back I was building a lot of software around social media: post planners, Facebook ads managers, content tooling, internal dashboards for schedulers and editors. Those systems eventually became the backbone of a company I spun up, which was a full-service social media agency.

The agency grew. I was hiring, the client roster was getting heavier, the deliverables were getting bigger. When you sell commercial content creation or social media management to large companies or public institutions, one of the non-negotiable clauses in every contract is that the content you deliver is free from third-party rights issues. Breaking that clause means the contract gets torn up and you start counting damages in legal fees and settlements.

On top of that, using a photo, illustration, or a piece of music without a proper licence makes you liable directly to the author. And that liability is not cheap either.

The platforms we were pulling from

These are the ones we used directly, and the ones most agencies I talked to were using too: Freepik, Shutterstock, Adobe Stock, Envato Elements, iStock / Getty, 123RF, Pond5, Vecteezy, Canva, and Depositphotos.

Over time the number of licences sitting across those accounts became very large. When I counted the total spend across all platforms and years, it was somewhere around $50,000. That's what we had paid to photographers, illustrators and composers for legitimate use rights on their work.

Copyright enforcement is not a fantasy

There is an entire industry of startups whose business model is finding unlicensed use of images on the internet. Services like Pixsy, Copytrack, and Imatag crawl the web looking for matches against a photographer's portfolio and then automate the legal pursuit. YouTube Content ID does the same thing for video and music at platform scale.

What protected us was that we had actually paid for everything. The proof of that payment lived on our accounts at the stock platforms. Until one day it almost didn't.

The day the account went dark

One morning, one of my staff tried to log into a platform where we had a big slice of our licences. The password did not work. We had 2FA on every account, so a simple reset was not going to be enough. He followed the standard recovery procedure. Shortly after, an email came in saying the account had been automatically locked pending review.