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Promptfree, for everyone, and the only version there is

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Do not build this. The licence is the product, and that is the entire point.

What you are paying for is not files — it is permission to use them, and an indemnity if that permission turns out to be wrong. A photograph of a recognisable person or a branded object needs a model or property release, and the paid tier is where those exist. Using an image without one is a risk that lands on you, years later, in a letter.

WHAT TO DO INSTEAD
- Keep it if you publish commercially and use stock photography regularly. It is cheap for what it removes
- The free tier of the same service is genuinely usable for a great deal, with its own licence terms — read them rather than assuming

WHAT TO DO REGARDLESS

**Keep an asset register.** One file listing every image, its source, its licence, the date you obtained it, and where you used it. When somebody asks — and for a business that publishes, somebody eventually does — that file is the answer. Without it you are reconstructing a decade of decisions from memory.

**Prefer assets you do not have to defend:**
- Your own photographs, which are always the most distinctive option and usually the most trusted
- Generated typographic images from your own templates, which is under Canva elsewhere in this catalogue and is faster than searching for a photograph once it exists
- Open-licensed sources, with the attribution requirement recorded per file so it is not forgotten

**And optimise whatever you use:**
- Resize to the sizes actually used, convert to AVIF or WebP with a fallback, and strip metadata
- A stock photograph shipped at four thousand pixels is the single largest waste on most sites

THE HONEST NOTE
A generic stock photograph makes a page look like every other page. The best-looking sites in most categories use their own photographs or no photographs at all, and that is a design decision rather than a budget one.

THE ONE-LINE VERSION
You are buying permission, not pixels. Keep an asset register, and consider using fewer stock photographs.