martin_kivi's comments

Shameless plug but maybe https://www.shoperb.com may be interesting. I'm the founder of the company, if there's anything I can help with, just let me know.

We're quite flexible when it comes to feature development and listen closely what our customers need. We work well with various credit card gateways, etc. We can do quite a bit of custom development as well based on your specific requirements.

If your target audience is in Europe and you care about multi-language support then Shoperb might be an option (I'm the founder). While it is a SaaS, we work rather closely with our merchants and help them often to get their store going, do custom integrations etc.

I believe Photry (www.photry.com, currently in beta, I'm the founder) could be a possible solution in the long run. Since we started, a lot has changed on online photo storage market.

With that in mind we've started to look more on how photographers with larger photo volumes could benefit from our service. From the feedback from few photographers we've already included some features (RAW photos with smaller JPG thumbnails, workspaces and personal sharing for example) that will make the day to day workflow a bit easier. Currently our goal is to build something that would fit better for professional photographers (public for clients, ordering prints and possibly integrated payment flows, win/mac client + plugins for your favorite photo software).

Pricing wise we are currently not the cheapest but we have thoughts on how to make this better for high volume photographers. If you're one of them then please send me an email (martin at photry.com) and I would love to talk a bit further what we plan to do and if we would fit your storage needs.

Looks like very few (or none) of the people here have actually used Sortfolio as paying customers. I believe a lot of the doubt wouldn't be here if you would have done that.

As for some background information, then I run a small Ruby on Rails development agency called PerfectLine (http://www.perfectline.ee) that caters specifically to startup founders who need to create their minimum viable products.

We have been paying for Sortfolio since the beginning of 2010 and actually couldn't be any happier with the kind of leads it brings in. I can say that quite a big chunk of our customers have actually found us first on Sortfolio and they usually convert to actual sales pretty well. It might be that our price and quality of service is in the right spot but on the other hand there's a good chance that the people coming through Sortfolio usually have a decent knowledge about what they want and what to expect.

I believe that Sortfolio has actually helped quite a few small design or development teams get off ground. It worked really well for us and I don't see why anyone else should see any worse return rates. That $99 per month is so little when compared to actual return it will get you.

I noticed that Sortfolio currently has around 10,000 free users and I believe that with little upselling it would be possible to convert a good portion of them to paying customers thanks to the value it actually provides. So from that perspective it shouldn't be too hard to earn back the $480,000 37signals is asking for Sortfolio.