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 licencedownloader.com, the 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.
The agency years
Let me set the scene first. A few years back I was building a lot of software around social media: post planners, Facebook ads managers, content creation 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. These are serious numbers, the kind that can end a small studio overnight.
So in short: we had to use stock material and original shoots produced in-house by my team. There is no shortage of places to buy that legally.
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
- 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
In case anyone is still tempted to cut corners here, let me say what I was watching the whole time from the sidelines. 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.
So the idea that nobody will ever notice does not survive contact with reality. I have watched peers in the industry swallow five-figure settlements for a single "photo from the internet" that somebody on the team dropped into a deck. The frequency is going up, not down. And I think that's fair, because creators deserve to be paid for their work.
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.
There was no explanation of why. The email was a canned one, and the support ticket was going to take time to answer. I was not worried about the $20 we would spend on the next batch of photos. I was worried about the licences.
Because up until that moment, we had not been downloading the licence certificate for every single file we used. We trusted the account dashboard to be there when we needed it. Meaning: if we could not recover that account, we were going to lose the proof that we owned the rights to tens of thousands of dollars of assets that had already shipped to clients.
The resolution and the lesson
After back-and-forth with the platform, they eventually confirmed the lock had been a mistake, and the account was restored. Happy ending.
Except, it wasn't really. I had just spent a week imagining what I would say to lawyers if that account had stayed dark and a copyright claim had landed three months later. So as soon as we had access again, I made a decision: we're downloading every single licence, across every platform, and we're keeping our own copy.
And that is where the story turns technical. Because downloading them turned out to be worse than I expected.
The anfractuous grind
Here was the problem: on every platform we were using, the licence certificate was only downloadable one asset at a time. Click into the asset. Click download certificate. Wait. Next asset. Click. Download. Next.
With a few thousand licences on a single platform, that becomes an anfractuous workflow that nobody on the team was going to survive. It was the kind of task people quit over. I tried sitting down and doing it myself for a morning, and I realised I would be on it for literal days if I kept it up at a human click-speed. Days that I didn't have as a founding engineer trying to scale a social media platform at the same time.
So I built a better way. The details are not the point here, but the result was that we pulled every licence we had, from every account, in a fraction of the time the manual route would have taken. We zipped it, labeled it per platform, and archived it off the stock sites entirely.
Crisis averted. The agency went back to it's normal rhythm, and every time a platform announced it was shutting down a region, changing terms, or deprecating an older product, we ran the same job again on top of our live downloads. Paranoia became policy.
Years later, one email
I had almost forgotten the whole thing. At some point I stopped needing my Adobe Stock and Freepik subscriptions, so in 2023 I wrote up the Freepik download workflow: How I Downloaded Almost 1000 Freepik Licences at Once. For three years the article sat there with modest traffic. I assumed nobody cared about this problem.
Then, recently, I got an email from a man who worked in the creative industry. Very friendly, very specific, very stressed. He had the same problem we had. He had accumulated thousands of licences across several platforms, his subscription was expiring, and he did not know how to get them out. He had found my 2023 article and wanted to know if I could help.
I helped him. His licences arrived in a ZIP, he filed them somewhere safe, and he told me he could finally sleep at night whether the platform stayed up or went away. And that email stuck with me for days, because it was the first clear signal that the problem I had solved for myself years earlier was still sitting there for everyone else.
So I built licencedownloader.com
That email was the trigger, and a weekend of work later the service was live at licencedownloader.com. You give it the list of platforms where you have subscriptions, we pull every licence certificate for you, and we hand it back as a ZIP sorted by platform. Pricing starts at $29 for up to 500 assets and scales up from there, with a custom tier for enterprise libraries.
Back up your licences before you need them. If you have a stock subscription on Freepik, Shutterstock, Adobe Stock, Envato, iStock, 123RF, Pond5, Vecteezy, Canva, or Depositphotos, we can pull every licence certificate you have ever bought into a clean ZIP you own. Start at licencedownloader.com — from $29.
I'm not going to pretend this is a giant business idea. It's a service that solves one irritation and turns it into a clean deliverable. But the more I talk to people about it, the more it turns out to be oddly universal.
Who should care about this
From the conversations I have had since the launch, this is the rough list of people and teams who keep raising their hand:
- Marketing and social media agencies with client-ready portfolios
- Film, TV, and post-production houses that buy footage and music stock
- Independent YouTubers and podcasters who use stock visuals and music cues
- News publishers and editorial sites with heavy daily image usage
- Ad agencies handling multi-brand campaigns
- Game studios buying concept art, textures, and sound effects
- E-learning platforms stocking their courses with stock illustrations
- E-commerce brands producing product pages, lookbooks, and catalogs
- Architectural visualisation studios and interior design agencies
- Real estate marketers running virtual tours and listing pages
- Creative freelancers who moonlight for multiple clients
If you are in any of those categories and you have been on a stock subscription for more than a year, you have a licence library that matters and a dashboard that the platform can change on you without asking. The only defense is your own copy, and if you do not want to live through the weeks of clicking yourself, that is exactly what licencedownloader.com is for.
Sources
- 17 U.S. Code § 504 — Remedies for infringement: Damages and profits, U.S. Copyright Office. Statutory damages range from $750 to $150,000 per work for copyright infringement.
- Tom Smykowski, How I Downloaded Almost 1000 Freepik Licences at Once, 2023.
- Pixsy — image monitoring and enforcement.
- Copytrack — automated image copyright enforcement.
- Imatag — invisible image watermarking and tracking.
- YouTube Content ID, how platforms automate music and video rights claims at scale.
Related reading
- Licence Downloader — How to download your Freepik licences manually. The exhaustive manual route for Freepik, with screenshots. Useful if you want to understand what our service does for you before you buy it.
- Licence Downloader — How to download your Shutterstock licences manually. Step-by-step Shutterstock export guide.
- Licence Downloader — How to download your Adobe Stock licences manually. The same walkthrough for Adobe Stock.
- All ten platform guides at Licence Downloader. Freepik, Shutterstock, Adobe Stock, Envato, iStock, 123RF, Pond5, Vecteezy, Canva, and Depositphotos.
Over to you
If you run a studio, an agency, a content team, a publication, a YouTube channel, or even a solo freelance desk that rents stock by the hundred, here is my honest question for the comments. How many of your business-critical licences and proof-of-purchase documents live only inside somebody else's dashboard right now? And what is your plan if that dashboard locks you out tomorrow morning — before or after you've spent a weekend clicking them out yourself
If the answer is "I would rather not find out", the service for that is here: licencedownloader.com.