Almost everything sold as sync licensing software is a subscription. Catalog hosting runs roughly $8 to $27 a month for a solo writer in 2026, more with add-ons or large catalogs, marketplaces take a cut or charge submission fees, and the free tiers that do exist are tightly capped (ReelCrafter's free plan, for example, allows 100 audio tracks and 5 share links). If you are early in sync and not yet earning from it, that is a hard place to start.
Here is what is genuinely free, what each free option actually does, and where the ceiling is on each. I make Pitchkit, which is a paid one-time tool rather than a free one, so it is listed at the end with its honest limits rather than mixed in with the free options.
Still the most common serious system, and it works: columns for tempo, key, mood, theme and status, filtered as needed. The cost is upkeep. Every value is typed by hand, your tagging vocabulary drifts as your taste changes, and the sheet goes stale within a month or two of the last time you forced yourself to update it.
The harder ceiling is that a spreadsheet filters, it does not rank. You can narrow to "pop" and "upbeat". You cannot paste a brief and get your catalog sorted by fit.
A well-organised Dropbox or Drive folder with consistent file naming genuinely does deliver music to a supervisor. You lose per-song access control, download permissions, listener analytics and the professional presentation of a real catalog platform, and free storage tiers fill fast with WAVs.
Workable early. Worth replacing once people are actually asking for links.
Some catalog platforms offer a limited free plan. Read the storage cap in gigabytes rather than song count, since a WAV master is roughly ten times an MP3, and check whether sharing links and access controls, the actual reason to use these tools, are on the free plan at all. Often they are not.
This one is mine, and it is a paid tool: $39, one time. It analyses your songs from the audio itself, tempo, key, energy, brightness, danceability, optionally transcribes lyrics with Whisper, and ranks your whole catalog against any brief you paste, artist references included, then builds the pitch folder.
It belongs on this page as the thing the free options above eventually run into: a spreadsheet filters but cannot rank, and memory stops scaling past a few hundred songs. One purchase, no recurring fee, and a 14-day full refund if it does not fit the way you work.
| Situation | Spend |
|---|---|
| Not getting briefs yet | Nothing on software. The problem is access, not tooling. |
| Getting briefs, catalog under ~30 songs | Nothing. Free tools genuinely cover this. |
| Getting briefs, catalog past a few hundred songs | A one-time matching tool. This is where pitching from memory quietly starts costing you placements. |
| Supervisors asking for links | Hosting. This is the moment a monthly platform earns its fee. |
| Placements happening | Rights administration, so you actually collect. |
For the catalog-matching half of the job, not anymore. Pitchkit, the matching tool made by the author of this page, is a one-time $39 purchase for macOS with brief matching, artist reference lookups, Whisper lyric transcription and pitch folder creation all included, and no subscription. The genuinely free routes for matching are a maintained spreadsheet and your own memory.
For the catalog-hosting half, private streaming links, access controls, listener analytics, there is no meaningfully free option, because that category has real storage and bandwidth costs behind it. Platforms like DISCO, DropCue and ReelCrafter run roughly $8 to $27 a month for a solo writer in 2026, more with add-ons or large catalogs, and a shared cloud folder is the free workaround if you can live without access control.
No. Pitchkit is $39, one time, with every feature included on an unlimited catalog: brief matching, artist reference lookups, Whisper lyric transcription and pitch folder creation. There is no subscription, no account and no watermark, and updates are included.
Pitchkit either helps on your actual catalog against your actual briefs or it does not, so the purchase comes with a 14-day full refund: one email, no questions asked.
Yes, and plenty of working writers do. Consistent file naming, a maintained spreadsheet, a shared cloud folder for delivery, and discipline about updating both will carry you a long way. Software does not get you briefs, and it does not write better songs.
Where free stops scaling is catalog size. Somewhere past a few hundred songs the spreadsheet goes stale, your memory stops being a reliable index, and the failure mode becomes specific: you send four songs, the brief closes, and a week later you remember the one that would have won it. That is the point where a tool starts paying for itself, and it is worth solving with a one-time purchase rather than a subscription.
Not really, for what Disco actually does. Its value is hosted, access-controlled streaming links that a music supervisor can open without installing anything, plus analytics on who listened, and that has genuine infrastructure cost behind it. A shared Dropbox or Drive folder is the honest free substitute: it delivers files, but with no per-song permissions, no streaming, no analytics and no professional presentation.
If what you actually wanted from Disco was help deciding which songs to send, that is a different category, catalog matching, where a one-time purchase replaces a subscription, see the comparison on this site.
It depends entirely on where the audio goes. Anything that uploads your masters means unreleased material sits on a third party's servers under their terms of service and their security, which is worth reading rather than assuming, particularly for work under NDA.
Local tools avoid the question by never uploading. Pitchkit analyses audio on your own Mac, has no servers and no accounts, and the only data that ever leaves the machine is an artist name, and only if you add your own API key for artist-reference lookups.
Pitchkit is the whole Mac app: brief matching, artist references, lyric transcription and pitch folders all included. $39, one time. No account and no subscription.
Get Pitchkit: $39, one time →