Photo & video creator tools
Features people already paid for moving behind new paywalls.
What people complain about
| Complaint | Share |
|---|---|
| Reliability — crashes, freezes, “doesn’t work” | 12.0% |
| Missing capability | 11.8% |
| Price & value | 7.5% |
| Ads & upsell pressure | 7.0% |
| Billing & cancellation | 6.3% |
| Slowness | 5.0% |
| Export & lock-in | 4.1% |
| Capability removed | 3.4% |
| Complexity & onboarding | 2.6% |
In their words
“Too damn glitchy. I've used this for over a year but will not be renewing it again. There are constant issues. EDIT and update: sadly i still use this app. now the glitch is the screen will wash out. the screen will turn all white and u can't see anything. happens every time i use it for months now. i have to force stop the app or restart the phone.”
Picsart AI Photo Editor, Video · 2★ · 995 votes
“For being free, it's not terrible, but certainly not what it used to be. Intense amount of glitches (+ premium ads w/ sneaky payment pop-ups). Main gripe are the number of crashes.. saves somewhat mid-project, always closes instead of actually using the back button. The new layout makes it tedious to start a new/blank project, if able to. Janky navigation at best now, UI overhaul changes w/out you even updating. AI theft now too? Ridiculous. Can no longer exit stickers w/o fully exiting project.”
Picsart AI Photo Editor, Video · 2★ · 782 votes
“VSCO used to be great but so many basic functions are locked behind a paywall including presets I've actually paid for and used before their new model. Locking grain, highlight/shadow, and split tones surprised me. Haven't used it in a while and a bit disappointed to see what it's become considering how they dominated aesthetics. I want VSCO to get their coin and have paid for their things in the past but this model isn't it.”
VSCO: Photo Editor · 2★ · 295 votes
“I used to love VSCO, it definitely created the atmosphere of art that Instagram was originally intended for. Recently though it's started to change, starting with the 'Trending' category on the home page being taken down, and the lack of support and new features for Android users that has always been an issue. Now they are locking historically free tools behind paywalls to get people to subscribe. Honestly I don't even know how much longer I will stay on the app, it's getting so frustrating.”
VSCO: Photo Editor · 2★ · 263 votes
Payer pressure 0.13 clears the gate, but the complaint pattern is diffuse price resentment rather than an unsolved workflow a small team could out-execute. Recorded rather than pursued.
What this study cannot tell you
- About 41% of substantive reviews are not matched by the taxonomy, so every percentage here is a floor, not a true rate. The miss rate is roughly uniform across niches, so comparisons between them still hold.
- App-store reviews over-represent the daily user. Buyers complain on G2, Capterra and in churn calls, and those sources are not represented.
- No recency weighting: a complaint from 2021 counts the same as one from last week, so some cited failures may already be fixed.
- Coverage is uneven between stores; where an app is iOS-only in practice its share is computed from Apple data alone.