In short - we would advise avoiding the stock service "DepositPhotos.com" for professional work. With our experience, their marketing team asked for more money after we purchased a licence and put us in a very difficult legal position.

In most places in the world, it is illegal to pull images or video from the internet and use it without the artist's permission.

In most cases there is a cost for using third party ("Stock") multimedia - be it photos, videos or graphic design. The artist needs a payment for their art. It puts food back on their table and supports their livelihood.

So ethical videographers will buy multimedia that we don't make ourselves from Stock photo and video service companies. This should be a small once off, royalty free payment.

Be aware of websites offering fee stock media. You need to ask yourself - why is this "free"? Do I have the real owner's consent? Am I actually dealing with the real owner (or has this media been stolen)?

Then there are some stock service companies like DepositPhotos.com that we would advise you to also avoid.

We purchased stock footage with DepositPhotos.com in July 2022 with their Standard Licence (a commercial license).

From the DepositPhotos.com website July 2022...

"The Standard License is a default license type that allows you to use a downloaded file for personal and commercial purposes within the terms of the Standard License.

It covers various use cases, including advertising and marketing, UI designs in websites and apps, product packaging, newspapers and magazines, book design, and more.

If you have a Standard License, you can print no more than 500,000 copies of material created using a downloaded file."

But after purchasing and delivering a commerical licence for the media, DepositPhotos.com then came back 4 days later saying that we needed to pay for a "company plan"... that our Standard Commerical Licence was "strictly prohibited"... and they quoted clauses from terms and conditions that we were not issued with, nor had I seen during purchase. 

It looks to us that this company's sales team is "upselling" their product, but in doing so, DepositPhotos.com nullified our legal rights - potentially putting our company and client in a ransom scenario. 

Fortunately this happen prior to publishing, so we bought the same stock imagery and was issued a licence from iStockphoto.