"Don't screenshot, respect the photographer": Brazilians take a selfie and buy their sports photos by face. Banlek sold R$400M in a year

Banlek is Brazil's sports photo marketplace: photographers shoot strangers at beaches, pitches and running tracks and upload them to the site. The people photographed take a selfie, and the system finds every photo of them by face, for about R$20 each. Its global ranking this month climbed from #47k to #22k, but this isn't a new surge; the veteran player is simply in its peak season. The business has already been covered thoroughly by Brazilian financial media, and there are plenty of rivals. What's worth watching is how it gets photographers to bring in customers for it, and whether that playbook still has room in other countries and other scenes.

A goalkeeper's complaint

On 2024 Aug 30, an amateur player from Brazil posted a TikTok with the #banlek tag and nothing but an angry emoji as the caption. It has 78k views so far. The top comment (51 likes) reads: "The photographer stood behind my goal the whole match and didn't take a single photo of me 😭". Replies pile on: "Worst part is starting the match and having fewer photos than the sub" and "That guy got photos after two minutes on the pitch, I played twenty and got none."

In November of the same year, a five-a-side football creator with 90k followers posted a video captioned "this one is only for people who have mídia". In Brazilian amateur football circles, "having mídia" means a photographer shot you during the match. The comments kept repeating the same line: "Don't screenshot, respect the photographer."

That's what Banlek sells: amateur players, runners, surfers and fans in the stands want a good photo of themselves in action for Instagram, and they'll pay R$20 for it. The company says about 99% of photos end up posted on Instagram (Brazil Journal, 2025-04).

How it works

• On the photographer side: sign up free and shoot anywhere people are active: road races, beach morning training, beach tennis, CrossFit, amateur matches, Série A stands. Upload after the event and set your own prices. At the event, hand out a QR code or a small blue card with a link to the photo gallery.
• On the buyer side: scan the code to open the gallery on banlek.com, take a selfie, and the system only shows photos that include you; everyone else's are hidden. Pay to download. Digital photos average about R$20; add R$2 to get prints, which can also be made into stickers and frames.
• Platform cut: about 10% on digital photos, and photographers on the R$97/month membership keep 9%; prints and frames take about 50%. Prints are mostly bought by children and teenagers (Valor International, 2026-10-06; Exame, 2026-07-14).

The main battlefield is the web. The Google Play app has 1.13M installs in total, gained about 49k more in the last 9 days, and ranks between #5 and #14 in Brazil's free Photography chart (Google Play, 11-07); the iOS Brazil store has only 718 ratings. Most people scan the code and buy directly on the web.

Scale: all figures are company-reported

Cumulative bookings since founding: R$700M, target R$1B by early 2027. CEO Jonathas Guerra says some photographers on the platform sell R$75k in a month (Exame). The founding team is programmer Guerra and a retired air force colonel. It launched in January 2020 and hit COVID two months later. Now the Guerras run it, with his wife Maria Eduarda as CFO.

Why it rose this month

In global website rankings it was #47,376 in Oct 8 and #22,430 in Nov 5, which looks like it doubled in a month. But at the end of July, during the World Cup, it was already around 30k, then it dropped in 8 and September, and now it's just climbing back. In Brazil it has stayed in the top 1,000 sites the whole time, unchanged for months.

Its peers rose at the same time. The biggest rival, Fotop, went from 140k to 36k, rising even more than Banlek. Germany's Sportograf and America's MarathonFoto also climbed. The cause looks seasonal: the southern-hemisphere spring running season, year-end events, the Brazilian league's final stretch, and the northern autumn marathon season (inference).

Banlek also did several things in October on its own. Its free photography workshop tour, "Banlek Experience", moved north to the state of Pará in late October, and TikTok is full of students posting group photos. On October 3 it was the single-match sponsor for a Recife sports club. On October 6 Valor ran a long feature on it. How much each of these contributed is impossible to tell from outside.

Where users come from: photographers do the recruiting for it

The photographers are the sales team. Every photographer wants to sell more photos, so they hand out QR codes and cards at the event and bring buyers to banlek.com. Banlek spends almost nothing buying consumer users, which is why it broke even in year 2023. Its official TikTok, @banlekapp, has only 7.8k followers, and almost all its content is aimed at photographers: how to sell photos with cards at carnival, how to upload faster. The most-viewed video was a photographer-venting skit from December 2024, at 310k views.

So its effort goes into winning photographers. The commission dropped from about 30% at the start to about 9%, while older rivals take 10% to 25% per event. Payouts arrive within 24 hours. It built anti-screenshot protection, because "seeing it and screenshotting it" was photographers' biggest grievance. It ran free workshops, reaching 15 cities and 2,500 photographers in 2026 years, and it has a dedicated "move from another platform to Banlek" page. It also bought three companies: rival Epics for R$9.5M, surf-photo platform SurfMappers for R$1.7M, and UliSite, which covers Paraguay and Portugal. What it bought was ready-made photographers and territory.

It created a category that didn't exist before. Before, event photos were "the organizer signs a contract, buys out the race, and sends people to shoot." Banlek is an open marketplace where anyone can shoot any scene. That made beach training sessions and stadium crowd shots, which have no organizer, sellable. Rival Fotto's blog even admits Banlek popularized single-photo sales for surfing and beach sports. Stadium stand photos rest on agreements: it has deals with 16 of the 20 Brasileirão clubs, letting it shoot the stands at big stadiums like Maracanã and Mineirão (Valor).

It also rides trends with free mini-features. In May 2026, before the World Cup, it launched a free "selfie to player card sticker" feature that needs no sign-up (clmais, 2026-05-31). Printed as fridge magnets or stickers, it charges for them (Exame). Its ranking hit around 30k at the end of July, and the timing matches.

I didn't find whether it runs ads. Not finding them doesn't mean it doesn't.

Who it's competing with

Face search is no longer a technical moat. Foco Radical offers it for free, and AchaFoto runs in the browser. In Brazil this is now a mature market of four or five platforms competing for photographers. The CEO himself admits rivals have been poaching his photographers over the past 12 months (Exame).

Its next steps

Banlek is going abroad itself. It started in Europe in 2024, in Portugal, Spain, Finland, France and Ireland, and booked over R$1M in half a year. The target is €5M in European revenue by the end of 2026 (a company goal). In the US it opened a recruiting page, banlekus.banlek.com, headlined "Shoot the Soccer Fans". There's no entry fee. Selected photographers get stadium credentials to shoot fans in the stands, and each fan purchase earns the photographer a cut, paid out in 1 to 3 business days. Before the World Cup it had already shot two US national team warm-up matches from the stands. The CEO says Asia is the next target (Valor).

If it were you

C. There's something to learn, but following it isn't worth much. The business is real and profitable, but Brazil is already crowded, the revenue has been reported in the press, and Banlek is itself expanding into the US, Europe and Asia. The hardest part of a two-sided market is the cold start: you need a few hundred photographers before buyers show up, and Banlek and Fotop each have over a hundred thousand.

Who it suits: teams that already have photographer relationships, such as event organizers, photography-training businesses, or photographer SaaS companies (Fotto came out of photographer software company Alboom almost as a side project). Also people who can get exclusive shooting rights at a particular kind of venue, like a city's amateur league, a chain of climbing gyms, a theme park, or several universities' graduation ceremonies.

Who it doesn't suit: anyone trying to build a general "find your photos by face" site to go head-to-head with Banlek and Fotop, or anyone with no photographers and no venue relationships who only knows how to code. Face search isn't the moat here. Photographers and venues are.

How: don't copy the whole market. Pick a corner it hasn't covered or covers poorly. First, change the country: somewhere with lots of amateur sport, a culture of posting on social media, and no open photo marketplace yet, such as Mexico, Colombia, Indonesia or the Philippines (inference; I didn't check each country). Second, change the scene. Sport is Banlek's bulk, but there are many "someone shoots, nobody sells" scenes left: youth football leagues (parents will pay), climbing gyms, ski resorts, wedding guest photos. Lock down one type of venue first, then recruit photographers into it.

How to get customers: copy its approach of spending money on supply. Recruit 20 to 50 local photographers first. Set the commission a notch below local rivals, pay out the same day, and add anti-screenshot protection. Print QR-code cards for them to hand out at the event. Don't spend money on buyers. Let the people being photographed share the photos, since every photo posted to Instagram is an impression.

When to go: if you're going to a new country, move before Banlek gets there. It's already recruiting stand photographers in the US, and Asia is said to be next. Once it arrives with a brand and funding from a hundred thousand-plus photographers, local small teams will struggle to win them over.

Signs you've misjudged it: (1) most of your first batch of photographers sell nothing in three months, meaning people in that scene won't pay for their own photos; (2) a local, established platform already charges per event, contracts with organizers, and has taken over the events; (3) conversely, if Banlek shows clear sales on its US stands project within a year, it means the "stand crowd photo" play can be copied across countries, and you should quickly go after venues and team agreements in the countries it hasn't reached yet.