Photo-sharing site 500px has launched a new price plan which undercuts Flickr’s Pro option by $5.
Prior to Tuesday’s launch of the new $20 per year Plus service, 500px offered only the free and $50 per year Awesome membership options. The Plus option offers much the same as Awesome, except that there’s no personalized portfolio features where a user can add a custom domain name, among other things.
500px COO and co-founder Evgeny Tchebotarev announced Plus in a post on the site’s blog on Tuesday.
“Plus still has all the fantastic features of the basic accounts but we have developed a couple of completely new things you’ll love: Sets and Statistics,” he wrote.
Sets allows you to group your photos — much like you can in Flickr. Statistics does what it says on the tin, giving you the opportunity to see what kind of web traffic your pictures are getting. It also pulls together stats for likes, dislikes, favorites and comments relating to your work.
Unlimited uploads are also possible with the new Plus membership plan, together with the option of selling your pictures.
Toronto-based 500px, which launched in 2009, has become increasingly popular with serious photographers, including professionals. Attracted by the site’s clean interface and often inspirational images, photographers can also rate each other’s pictures and leave comments.
While many will see 500px’s announcement as an attempt to pull users from Flickr, 500px CEO and co-founder Oleg Gutsol said in an interview with GigaOM last year that he saw big differences between the Yahoo-owned photo sharing site and his own.
“We see Flickr more as a photo storage site, where anyone can upload all their photos in one place and share them with their friends,” Gutsol said. “We’re interested in getting the best photography in the world in one place, and growing the best photography community.”
The new membership plan from 500px could conceivably attract professionals that currently use Flickr who’ve been considering jumping ship, though with Flickr still pulling in plenty of web traffic, and many enjoying the vibrant discussion forums located on the site, it’s likely a good deal of professional snappers will choose to simply manage both sites alongside each other.
In the meantime, let’s see if Flickr responds to 500px’s news by cutting their Pro price or offering something new.
