Every platform in this category does the same core trick: a guest sends one selfie, the AI finds them across thousands of event photos, and they get only the shots they appear in. The differences that actually decide your bill are pricing model, whether WhatsApp delivery is included or metered, and whether the vendor publishes a price at all. Here are seven, compared on prices read from their own pricing pages.
All figures below were read from each vendor's own pricing page or in-app plan screen on 3 August 2026. We deliberately did not use G2, Capterra or competitor round-ups as price sources — this category changes fast and the aggregators are often a year stale. Prices change; check the source before you commit. We build SnapStream, so treat our own entry with the scepticism it deserves and verify the rest.
The seven, at a glance
| Platform | Pricing model | Entry price | Free tier | WhatsApp delivery |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SnapStream | Per event | Free (Taster) → $299 | Yes, permanent | Included |
| Fotify | Per event, one-time | $29.99 | Yes, 50 photos | Not advertised |
| TurtlePic | Annual, storage-metered | $132 / year | 7-day trial | Paid add-on |
| Kwikpic | Annual, photo-metered | $64.99 / year | Yes, 1,000 photos | Not advertised |
| SnapSeek | Credits, 1 per photo | $25 / 250 photos | No | Not advertised |
| Premagic | Sales-led | Not published | No | Included |
| Samaro | Sales-led | Not published | Yes, "Free Event" | Included, unlimited |
The pricing model matters more than the feature list
Face recognition is close to commoditised now. Every platform here claims high accuracy on group shots, side angles and poor light, and in practice they are all good enough that accuracy is unlikely to be your deciding factor. What varies enormously is the shape of the bill.
Event work is lumpy. A wedding photographer might shoot three events in March and none in June. A conference organiser runs one flagship event a year. An annual subscription charges the same in June as in March, and the metered ones keep charging for storage long after the gallery stopped being useful. That is the single biggest cost trap in this category, and it is invisible on a feature-comparison chart.
TurtlePic — annual plans metered on storage
TurtlePic is polished, ships 4K video, and has the most complete white-label story of the cheaper tools: custom domain, logos, watermarks. Its plan screen lives inside the app rather than on the marketing site.
| Plan | Per year | Storage | Max photos / event |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free trial | $0 (7 days) | 1 GB | 1,000 |
| Starter | $132 | 50 GB | 30,000 |
| Basic | $240 | 100 GB | 30,000 |
| Standard | $360 | 500 GB | 30,000 |
| Pro | $535 | 1 TB | 30,000 |
| Elite | $750 | 2 TB | 30,000 |
Two things to note. First, the meter is storage, so your bill is driven by the cumulative weight of every gallery you have ever uploaded, not by how many events you actually ran this year. Second, and more surprising for a tool sold on event photo delivery: WhatsApp messages are a paid add-on, billed per message. A custom domain is extra too.
TurtlePic is the better buy if you want 4K video in the same gallery as your photos, or if you shoot enough volume that an annual plan amortises well. We wrote a longer head-to-head at SnapStream vs TurtlePic.
Kwikpic — annual plans metered on photo count
Kwikpic is aimed squarely at working photography studios, and the feature depth reflects that: client favourites, portfolio websites, digital flipbook albums, team logins. Every plan includes unlimited facial recognition, which is a genuinely good call — several competitors ration face searches.
| Plan | Per year | Photos stored | Videos |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 1,000 | — |
| Basic | $64.99 | 20,000 | 20 |
| Standard | $129.99 | 100,000 | 100 |
| Essential | $259.99 | 200,000 | 200 |
| Premium | $519.99 | 500,000 | 500 |
The free plan is real — 1,000 photos, permanently — which makes Kwikpic one of the easiest tools here to trial properly. The meter is photo count rather than gigabytes, so it is more predictable than storage-based pricing, but it is still cumulative across every event you have ever run.
Fotify — the other genuinely per-event option
Fotify prices the way we think this category should be priced: one-time, per event, with the gallery lifetime scaling by tier rather than a meter running in the background.
| Plan | Price | Photos | Gallery access |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free Event | $0 | 50 | 7 days |
| Photo Gallery | $29.99 | Unlimited | 90 days |
| Premium Event | $49.99 | Unlimited | 365 days |
Unlimited photos at $29.99 an event is aggressive, and the 365-day gallery on Premium beats almost everyone including us. Fotify leans consumer and social — there is a swipe-based guest matching add-on at $19.99 — so it is a better fit for parties and social events than for a conference with sponsor obligations. WhatsApp delivery is not advertised as a first-class channel.
SnapSeek — pay per photo, credits never expire
SnapSeek sells credits at one per photo: $25 for 250, scaling down to about 7.2¢ a photo at 50,000. No subscription, credits do not expire, one year of storage included.
This is the cleanest model here for genuinely unpredictable workloads — buy a block, draw it down across events over years. It is also the most expensive per photo at low volume: a single 400-photo wedding costs about $40 in credits, and there is no free tier to test with.
Premagic — enterprise, and no longer really a photo tool
Premagic is the most established name in this list for large conferences, and it has visibly repositioned: the homepage now sells attendee-led marketing, AI avatars and advocacy posters, with AI photo distribution as one module among several. If your goal is measurable organic reach from a 10,000-person trade show, this is the serious option.
Samaro — strong WhatsApp story, quote-only pricing
Samaro is the closest competitor to SnapStream on mechanics: a WhatsApp bot handles both photo delivery and guest addition, with unlimited WhatsApp messages on every tier and face search throughout. Plans are structured by event size, from a "Free Event" tier up to Large Event, and there is a separate enterprise track with white-labelled apps and camera-to-cloud.
The catch is the same as Premagic's: both the personal and enterprise pricing pages say "get customized pricing" with a contact form. There is a free tier, so you can trial without talking to anyone, but you cannot budget from the website.
SnapStream — per event, WhatsApp-native, published prices
Our own entry, so read it critically. SnapStream gives every account free unlimited client galleries with 20GB of storage and no commission on sales. Face matching and WhatsApp delivery are activated per event, on the events that need them.
| Tier | Price / event | Guests | Photos |
|---|---|---|---|
| Taster | Free | 20 | 80 |
| Essential | $49 | 80 | 400 |
| Luxe | $149 | 200 | 1,500 |
| Classic | $299 | 600 | 4,000 |
The distinctive part is the delivery channel. Guests never install an app or create an account — they scan a QR code, send a selfie on WhatsApp, and their photos arrive as a WhatsApp message linking to a personal gallery. WhatsApp delivery is the product, not a metered add-on.
Where SnapStream is the wrong choice
- Galleries expire after 30 days on activated events. Fotify's 365-day Premium gallery and the annual-subscription tools keep galleries alive far longer.
- No 4K video. TurtlePic and Kwikpic both take video; we are photos only.
- Photo caps are per tier, so a photographer delivering 20,000 images from one event is better served by TurtlePic's 30,000-per-event ceiling or Kwikpic's volume plans.
- WhatsApp is the delivery channel. In markets where WhatsApp is not the default messenger, that strength becomes a limitation.
How to actually choose
Ignore accuracy claims — everyone says 99%-something and you cannot verify it from outside. Decide on these four instead:
- How many events a year? Under ten, pay per event. Over twenty or thirty, price out an annual plan and compare honestly.
- How do your guests actually receive things? If the answer is WhatsApp, check whether it is included or metered per message — that difference is invisible until the invoice arrives.
- How long must galleries stay live? 30 days, 90 days and 365 days are all on offer, and this is the spec people most often discover too late.
- Is the meter cumulative? Storage and stored-photo-count meters keep charging for events that finished years ago. Per-event and credit models do not.
One thing nobody advertises: consent
Every tool here builds a biometric face template from a guest's selfie. Under GDPR, POPIA and comparable regimes that is special-category personal data, and it needs informed, specific, opt-in consent from the person whose face it is — not from the organiser on their behalf.
Before you sign anything, ask the vendor three questions: what exactly is stored, how long face vectors are retained after the event, and how a guest withdraws consent and has their data deleted. A vendor that cannot answer crisply is a vendor that has not thought about it. This applies to us as much as to anyone else — ours is set out in our privacy policy.