I had a Shutterstock subscription for about 10 years. Through that time I figured out I had paid them around €30K. Some months ago some sales guy (from Germany), who was super rude and aggressive tried to bully me into buying a corporate account, which would have been much more expensive. When I told that I would just cancel my subscription, he then tried to scare me by saying that the licenses for the images that I already had would no longer be valid. I am sure this works on some people, but not with me. I wrote back that essentially I had paid all this money already for those licenses and implied that if the licenses were not valid then they could refund my 30K first and then we can discuss my licensing issues. Of course I never heard back from him.My issue with them is firstly that they want agencies now to pay much more money for the same cheap images that you see everywhere online. With other companies, if you pay more, you get more exclusive images.The second point, and really the bigger point, is this bullying and scare tactic sales technique which may even be illegal. So within a week I went from a longtime promoter to a hater. That is what happens when you treat your longtime customers this way.
