Limbo Music Alternative: Read the Price Before You Take the Call

Choosing a distribution partner usually means entering a sales process to find out what it costs, what the API can do, and what the contract will say. We built LabelGrid so that most of that work can be done without us in the room. The self-serve plans and the three standard API tiers are on the pricing page. The API documentation is public, with no login. The MCP server is open source, so the code your AI client would run against your catalogue is there to read. And this page links every Limbo Music value in the table to the page it came from, with the date.

The consequence is practical. You can size the standard cost, get internal approval and read the endpoints before you talk to anyone, and then have the conversation about your specific setup from a known position rather than from nothing.

The limit is also plain. Every LabelGrid B2B account involves a commercial conversation; Custom API is published from a starting price and sized in that conversation, and Imprint, our white-label portal, is scoped in it too. The published ladder is where that conversation starts, and it is not where it has to end. A custom deal is what happens when a business outgrows the ceilings of the listed plans, in tracks, in labels or in monthly royalty income, and every one of those limits can be renegotiated.

If you release your own catalogue, the LabelGrid path is short. Pick a published annual self-serve plan, start the 7-day trial, and upload. Dolby Atmos and spatial audio, Hi-Res and lossless delivery, Apple Motion artwork, audio fingerprinting, YouTube Content ID and social monetisation are part of the plan rather than per-track or per-release extras. Two terms are worth stating here rather than in a footnote: UGC and Content ID monetisation carries a 20% fee on revenue earned through LabelGrid's deals, and automated royalty splits run from Basic up and on every API tier, not on Solo or GATE.

How you pay is the part that matters most as you grow. Solo, Basic and Pro are flat yearly fees, and you keep 85%, 85% and 90% of standard-DSP royalties, with the 20% UGC and Content ID fee above as the exception. On Custom Distribution and the API tiers you keep 95% of royalties earned through LabelGrid's own standard-DSP deals and 100% on your own direct deals, with LabelGrid as infrastructure only. Limbo Music's distribution partners pay no platform fee and a commission on royalties instead. A commission costs little while you earn little and more as you earn more; on LabelGrid the plan fee is flat, and the share you keep is fixed by your plan.

Every release on a distribution plan is reviewed by a person for quality, metadata and rights before delivery, unless the account distributes only through its own direct deals. That is included, on every distribution plan, at no extra cost. Where Limbo Music is stronger for this reader is capital: through investor partners they fund royalty advances and put marketing work behind those releases. If that is part of what you need, we say so again further down.

Engine is the LabelGrid API. Its documentation is public with no login, three standard tiers are published, and a sandbox comes with every API plan once the plan is active. It is not a pre-purchase trial. Delivery is DDEX ERN 3.8.2, 4.3.0, 4.3.1 and 4.3.2. The MCP server that sits on the same API is open source under MIT and listed on the public MCP registry, and the command-line tool is on npm, so the tooling you would build on can be read before you build on it. The roadmap is set by what customers ask for, and the platform is improved continuously in response.

What moves an API bill is in the open too. The three standard API tiers are flat yearly fees and Custom API starts from one. You keep 95% of royalties earned through LabelGrid's own standard-DSP deals and 100% on your own. Each standard tier carries a track limit, a label limit and a monthly royalty processing cap; when your royalties settle above the cap you move up a tier, with no overage charge, so the platform fee steps with your volume while the 95% you keep stays the same. Limbo Music's comparison of the two of us calls that three meters, and the description is fair. What it leaves out is that every one of those meters can be renegotiated in a custom deal, which is what Custom API is for.

Limbo Music publishes its API documentation too, with OAuth 2.0 bearer tokens and a JSON:API specification. Test keys arrive with onboarding, and they describe a guided test environment and a demo platform rather than a full sandbox with simulated distribution. They also describe their MCP server as the first in B2B music distribution and in production since 2025. We are not going to argue about who was first. Ours is open source, so you can read it before you connect it; theirs is described on their own pages.

Choose Limbo Music if you want a distribution partner who funds advances and puts marketing behind them, who charges distribution partners a commission rather than a platform fee, and whose royalty reporting runs on Curve, which they describe as co-owned by Merlin. Those are real strengths, and they come with a qualification form and a proposal rather than a price list.

Choose LabelGrid if the situations on the right describe you. They have one thing in common: you would rather see the numbers first and have the conversation second.