picjumbo
Beautiful Free Stock Photos
After careful consideration, I have decided to discontinue our monthly and annual subscription plans for now.
Why make the change? I understand that in today’s fast-paced world, adding another monthly bill can be less than ideal. Additionally, attracting new customers has become increasingly challenging. By simplifying the pricing model to a one-time payment option, I aim to making it easier and more affordable for everyone to enjoy picjumbo's high-quality stock photos.
Active members are not affected by this change in any way — as we never change the price for members, nothing is changing now either.
Thank you for reading this and being a part of picjumbo. I appreciate your support and I am happy for every member in our PREMIUM Membership. I plan to keep bringing the best photos and images and this is hopefully a step towards making the whole picjumbo project a little more sustainable.
Last week I was contacted by Marko from Website Planet and asked to talk about picjumbo. We talked about how it all started, what it’s all about, who picjumbo helps, and lightly touched on plans for the future.
From the interview:
“The story is almost like a movie: I wanted to start selling my photos on stock photo sites to create something like passive income, but all the stock photo providers rejected me. But as a freelance designer, WordPress coder, and photographer, I didn’t give up and over a weekend I created my own website, my own stock photo site, where I uploaded my photos.”
Read the full interview on Website Planet: https://www.websiteplanet.com/blog/picjumbo-interview
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Sounds really awesome, but I think you forgot to attach the link 🙌
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Thanks! It looks like it's not showing the link on mobile. I can see it only on Desktop as well.
Here is the link: https://www.websiteplanet.com/blog/picjumbo-interview/
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Awesome! Thank you for sharing.
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- United States — 2,224,633 visitors — 17.16%
- China — 1,344,079 visitors — 10.37%
- South Korea — 788,026 visitors — 6.08%
- India — 668,688 visitors — 5.16%
- France — 536,869 visitors — 4.14%
- Brazil — 484,442 visitors — 3.74%
- Germany — 436,945 visitors — 3.37%
- United Kingdom — 387,407 visitors — 2.99%
- Russia — 374,040 visitors — 2.88%
- Poland — 310,133 visitors — 2.39%
First 1M month in pageviews 🙌🏻 Thanks to a tons of features and mentions in magazines like Entrepreneur, The Next Web, Designmodo, Lifehacker, Buffer Blog, WebDesignerDepot, Forbes, Smashing Magazine, INC, TechCrunch and more.
All this in just 11 months. Thank you 🙏🏻
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Hi Viktor, congrats! How do you fund hosting / time spent on development?
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Hey, thanks for your comment! Yes, hosting a website like this is quite difficult because we serve about 1 TB of data every week (6 TB in last 30 days). So I'm renting a dedicated server here in my country (Czechia) and also have a free Cloudflare plan (this is very important).
After some negotiations, and after a lot of money spent in the past, I'm paying about $250/month for the server now.
I paid everything with my own savings, but it was super easy to run it in early days:
- the whole website is powered by Wordpress and running on my own template (even today it's still running on Wordpress on my own template)
- no newsletter emails = free Mailchimp plan
- no big traffic = cheap shared hosting
- I'm using Gumroad by @sahil to run PREMIUM Membership = almost free + no development
Simply, it's profitable since day one.
But a very expensive part was newsletter — with 200,000+ subscribers I was spending around $900/month or $10,000/year (!!!). I will publish another milestone about it, so follow the product if you want to read more (I deleted half of the list ;)).
And there are AdSense ads since January 2014, then with very nice numbers.
Another thing is my own personal expenses (rent, tax, food, powerful macbook, camera gear, traveling, software, car, ...) so it's very easy to go into negative numbers.
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Use sendy as your newsletter. You will spend less than $100 a month on email if you send multiple emails (10 newsletters) a month.
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Like Yemi said, you should definitely check out Sendy (https://sendy.co/)! Its not as polished as other hosted offerings like Mailchimp, but it super cheap because it uses SES. The only downside is you have to host it yourself.
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Thanks @Yemi, it’s very interesting. I’ll check it soon👌🏻
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As an early user back then, I remembered I was thinking as the name suggests that PicJumbo must offer big beautiful high resolution stock photos. And indeed thats what we got. Thank you!
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That's perfect, great to hear that! 😍😍😍
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Hi Viktor, these posts from early days of picjumbo are very inspiring! I'm starting out with a similiar project (stock animated gifs). Your knowledge and experience is super valuable for me. Thanks for sharing 🙏
Greetings from a neighbour (Poland) 👋 -
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Woohoo awesome work Viktor! Looove the photos you've curated. Congratulations!
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Thank you so much! 🙌🏻
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Hi Viktor, great story! One thing I always think is why isn’t there a high quality video stock website? Like Unsplash for video or a vidjumbo? Seems like an obvious next move but no one really dominates and the ones that do are all pretty crappy. Any ideas why no good one yet?
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There's pexels video, pixabay, coverr and mixkit.
Last one is the highest quality. It has started lately so it's not as big as others. -
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Very good question! To be honest I wanted to create this project. I named it Motiohype and I even have a logo for it on my Dribbble. But it was very hard to keep focus on quality. It was hard to take a photo AND not forget to take a video and vice versa (mostly when traveling). I realized that I have to focus only on one thing if I want to make it sucessful.
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Ah ok! Makes sense. Yes I’ve always thought there must be something more difficult to it because I think there would be big demand for video but no website seems to have done it well yet.
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Congrats Viktor! Quick question:
When you first started, how were you populating content on the site, with free stock photos? Were you web scraping or giving some incentives to users to upload photos?
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Thanks! I'm an author of almost all photos on picjumbo :)
I'm still not sure about allowing other authors to publish on the website. Almost every month I'm reporting MY OWN stock photos published on other paid and free stock photo sites.
I want picjumbo to be 100% safe source of free photos.
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That is great, congrats! Is there any links where we could read your story building it?
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Thank you! :) I only have about the author page on picjumbo: https://picjumbo.com/about-viktor-hanacek
Fun fact: I had to change the button from ‘Download’ to ‘FREE Download’. People simply didn’t believe that the pictures are actually free 🎉
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Alright, thanks for sharing!
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This is an amazing milestone! Congratulations!!
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Thank you! 🙌🏻
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That's awesome. Congrats Viktor.
Can you share some of the features and also share any strategy you've got?
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Hey Harry, thank you! I started it at a good time because all these big magazines started writing about best free stock photo sites months after I started my website.
Simply go to google and copy & paste "free stock photo sites" — I bet you'll find picjumbo via magazines/blogs on the 1st page.
The biggest impact has Entrepreneur magazine with their post about best free stock photo sites. Around 238,000 users visited picjumbo from this post.
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What's been your strategy for getting press? Are you pitching these places or are they just writing about you on their own?
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Hey Courtland, thanks for your comment. I started it at a good time because all these big magazines started writing about best free stock photo sites on their own months after I started my website.
To be honest, I think there is almost no chance for solopreneur to start a new popular free stock photo site because we all "benefit" from these old blog posts and articles (thousands of backlinks etc.).
At least it would be very hard...
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Hi, congrats. If possible can you share the specs of your servers
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Thanks Washie!
Intel Xeon E3 1230 v3, 3,3 GHz, 4 cores, 8 threads
16GB RAM (+ free upgrade to 32GB if needed)
480 GB SSD + RAID1
1x IPv4 adressIt's from my order email back in 2016, so I don't know if there were any changes since then.
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Great milestone Viktor, congrats!
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Thank you! 🙌🏻
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My little website with free stock photos has reached 500.000 downloads within 10 months. I started this website last November and converting it to a free service (Nov 3) was the best thing I could make.
(for the first few days my photos were for $1.99, but I had no money for promoting the website, so after two days and two sales I made my photos free for everyone)
One of my photos was selected by the team in LG for their flagship-level smartphone LG G3 as a wallpaper. I said I don't need money for that, but they insisted to pay me. It was very nice to see my friends using their own smartphones with my photo as a wallpaper.
Photo is available for free here: https://picjumbo.com/bokeh-time/
On this day I started my first subscription service — picjumbo PREMIUM Membership. First steps to the best thing ever: recurring revenue.
Here I'm offering complete stock photo collections and unpublished + upcoming photos straight to your email inbox immediately after I make them.
On picjumbo website I was publishing 1 photos a day for FREE. In picjumbo PREMIUM Membership you can get for example 30+ photos at once, right after I make them.
The monthly subscription was $6/month.
Fun fact: For testing, I gave out the first three Memberships for $3/month. One of these Members was active even in 2018, 4 years later!
This day I launched picjumbo, a small website with free stock photos in high-resolution.
On picjumbo you can download all my stock photos for free.
- totally free
- no sign-up
- no "like this for download"
- highest resolution possible
- new photo every single day
- free for commercial & personal use
On this date there were about 20 photos and new photos were added daily.
It was quite hard to come up with the name of picjumbo. The only reason for this name was:
- the domain is free
- google doesn't know it
Done.
There is no special meaning of it, I just wanted to make it big (jumbo) and I wanted to have "pics" "photos" or something like that right in the name.
Yes, all stock photo sites rejected my photos back in 2013. I was a web designer and WordPress coder and I wanted something different. I wanted to stop starting every month at $0.
I was 20yo. I didn't want to make millions, I wanted to be free and start traveling. Passive income was a big thing then so after '$100 Startup' and 'Rich Dad Poor Dad' I started to look for opportunities.
I started selling my photos in packs on Creative Market (#1 sold product that time) and I started uploading my photos to all major stock photo sites.
Unfortunately, all of them rejected my photos.
The idea of my own stock photo site was born.
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This is awesome. If they reject you on their platform, then just create a new platform! Good stuff
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Exactly!! 💥
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I love your photos 🤝
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I’m super happy for that 🙌🏻🙌🏻
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I love me some picjumbo. I actually added your site to a published free checklist of my favorite stock photo websites. Hopefully, I was able to send you some traffic.
https://www.checkli.com/checklists/marvinrussell/15-totally-free-stock-photo-and-image-websites-1
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Perfect, thanks! 👏🏻
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Bravo!
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Why did they reject your photos?
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Because of "insufficient quality" 🤷🏻♂️
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Why do people pay for your site over others?
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My photos are 100% free. But you can get access to my exclusive & never-published photos in picjumbo PREMIUM Membership — if you like them. There are 100+ collections with over 6,000 photos, it costs $9.99/mo and every month you'll get at least 50+ new photos.
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Nice work Viktor
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Thanks! 🙌🏻
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Nice! What stage are you now, is it open to the public?
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What do you mean with open to the public? I’m the only photographer on picjumbo, and some of my friends also added their photos in last few months. I want it to be a 100% safe source of free photos.
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Oh, I am sorry I probably misunderstood you. I thought you were was working on your own photo selling platform. This is why I asked if your website already online and people can buy photos from.
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Awesome man. Keep it up!
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Thanks!! 🙌🏻
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Great collection :D Congrats!
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Thanks, Luis! 🙌🏻
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