Almost everything sold as sync licensing software is a subscription. Catalog hosting runs $25 to $99 a month, marketplaces take a cut or charge submission fees, and the free tiers that do exist are usually a storage allowance small enough to be useless. 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 has a free version, so the last entry is mine — the honest limits are listed with it.
The complete app with the catalog capped at 100 songs. It analyses those songs from the audio itself — tempo, key, energy, brightness, danceability — optionally transcribes their lyrics with Whisper, and ranks them against any brief you paste, artist references included. Pitch folder creation works too.
It is not a trial that expires and not a watermarked demo. The ceiling is the song count: at 100 songs indexing stops, and a one-time $49 licence removes the cap on the copy you already have.
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.
| Situation | Spend |
|---|---|
| Not getting briefs yet | Nothing on software. The problem is access, not tooling. |
| Getting briefs, catalog under ~100 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, yes. Pitchkit has a free version for macOS that indexes your first 100 songs with every feature enabled — brief matching, artist reference lookups, Whisper lyric transcription and pitch folder creation — with no account, no card and no expiry. A one-time $49 licence removes the 100-song cap.
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 and Songspace run roughly $25 to $99 a month, and a shared cloud folder is the free workaround if you can live without access control.
The catalog stops indexing at 100 songs. That is the only limitation: no watermark, no expiry, no feature held back, no account, and no card required to download it. Everything the paid version does, the free version does on those hundred songs.
The reasoning is that Pitchkit either helps on your actual catalog against your actual briefs or it does not, and no amount of marketing settles that question. A hundred songs is enough to judge the matching honestly, and roughly the point where holding your catalog in your head stops working anyway.
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 and there is a free option — 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.
The free version is the whole Mac app with the catalog capped at 100 songs — brief matching, artist references, lyric transcription and pitch folders all included. No account, no card, no expiry. $49 once removes the cap.
Download free — 100 songs →