Revelator Alternative for Labels and Distributors

Short answer: Revelator and LabelGrid sell the same shape of thing, a platform for a business that distributes other people’s music, a white-label configuration of it, and an API on top. The argument is not about whose product list is longer. It comes down to where each company publishes its price, how a developer reaches a test environment, and one distribution clause. Imprint, our white-label portal, is scoped and quoted at onboarding rather than published. Every Revelator value in the table below is from their own published pages, read 23 September 2026.

Revelator’s Terms say “Current fee schedules are available on the Site or in your Dashboard” and, in the distribution appendix, “These fees may be amended from time to time by us without notice to you”; their 32 distinct captured pages, read 23 September 2026, carry no price for Revelator Pro, the Revelator API or the white-label platform, and their own published site index at revelator.com/llms.txt lists no pricing page. At LabelGrid every self-serve distribution plan and every API tier is priced on our pricing page, including the Custom Distribution and API starting prices, and Imprint is scoped and quoted at onboarding rather than published, which is the half of this axis we concede. The claim is about where each company publishes, and nothing wider.

Products on one backend

Free-trial days on self-serve distribution plans

Yours on your own DSP deals, on Custom Distribution and the API tiers

Founded

Each Revelator value below is taken from one of their own published pages, linked beneath the table with the date we read them. A dimension their pages do not state is left out rather than guessed at, which is why some rows a sales deck would happily fill are missing here.

Each of the 11 Revelator values above is sourced from their own published pages, read 2026-09-23: api-docs.revelator.com/en/getting-started, revelator.com/anti-fraud-policy, revelator.com/content-policy, revelator.com/features/royalty-accounting, revelator.com/product/revelator-api, revelator.com/product/revelator-pro, revelator.com/terms-and-conditions. Dimensions we could not source from one of their primary pages are omitted rather than guessed.

Both companies publish API documentation without a login, and theirs is substantial: the Revelator getting-started page covers authentication, account signup, permissions, invitations and enterprise client endpoints. That half is parity, and anyone telling you otherwise has not read it.

The route to credentials is where the two diverge. Their getting-started page says “All testing should be done in a production environment using a dedicated sandbox account. If you do not already have a sandbox account, please contact us at [email protected] to create one”, adds that a staging environment “is no longer supported”, and their API product page tells you to “contact your Revelator representative” for sandbox access and credentials.

At LabelGrid the API tier prices are published and the sandbox is enabled as part of the API upgrade, so it opens once your plan is active. The limit is worth saying plainly: a B2B account here begins with a conversation too, with onboarding screening and KYC or KYB checks, and the sandbox is not a pre-purchase trial. What you can read before any of that is the price and the documentation.

Published plan prices

Every self-serve distribution plan and every API tier carries its price on our pricing page.

Public API docs

The Engine REST documentation is readable without an account and without a sales call.

Sandbox with the plan

The sandbox is enabled at the API upgrade, so it opens once the plan is active.

Open-source clients

Our MCP server is MIT-licensed on npm and listed on the public MCP registry.

The LabelGrid Tools plugin syncs releases, artists and download gates into WordPress every six hours, then builds release landing pages with Spotify pre-saves before release day and gated downloads afterwards. It is available to every account at no extra cost and needs no API plan. The same public API carries an open-source MCP server and a companion CLI.

Our rate is a published plan term. You keep 85% on Solo, 85% on Basic and 90% on Pro; from Custom Distribution and the API tiers up you keep 95% of standard-DSP royalties earned through LabelGrid’s own deals and 100% of what you earn on your own. Our Terms state accounting fees in a range between 0 and 20% of net payable revenue depending on the plan.

Revelator’s distribution terms pay “one hundred percent (100%) of our actual receipts … minus any applicable disbursements of funds fees as to be determined by us from time to time”, with the Service Fee charged separately. That is the same shape as ours, a platform fee alongside a share of what the company receives. So the useful question is not whose definition of receipts reads better; it is where you can read the number before you sign.

Both licences are non-exclusive and ownership stays with you. Their distribution terms add that “you agree not to use any other Digital Distribution service with respect to any DSPs except only to the extent that an Internet consumer store is no longer a DSP hereunder”. Ours is global and non-exclusive, the same content may go elsewhere at the same time, and no exclusivity survives termination.

Splits from Basic up

Royalty splits run automatically on Basic, Pro, Custom Distribution and every API tier; Solo does not include them.

Payout rhythm

Statements generate from the 21st, payments are initiated between the 3rd and the 14th of the next month, and funds land in 3 to 7 business days.

Trial and review

The self-serve distribution plans start with a 7-day free trial, and a person reviews every release before delivery unless the account distributes only through its own direct deals.

Both companies sell a white-label configuration of the same platform, so the question is how end customers sit inside it. Neither shape is free of cost to the operator, and this is the section where we say what ours costs.

Revelator’s white-label page offers a fully branded platform with “custom domains, subdomains, and a personalized user interface”, a “Label and Artist Portals” section to “Manage labels and artists at any scale”, and their distributor page offers “unlimited label and artist portals”. The structure is stated as parent-child: their Anti-Fraud Policy is written around “parent-child accounts” and a Client answering for “their end users/sub-accounts”, and their API documents an enterprise client model. Their help centre publishes operator documentation for running it.

Imprint puts your brand on your own domain and composes each end customer as a full workspace with identical capability, side by side rather than nested under a parent. A label workspace and an artist workspace get the same surface, and you are the one who sees across them. That costs you something real: a label customer does not inherit a supervised tier of artists beneath it, so an operator who wants that hierarchy is better served by a parent-child model. Imprint is scoped and quoted at onboarding.

The published ladder is the floor of a conversation rather than its ceiling. Label limits run Solo 1, Basic 3, Pro 5 and Custom Distribution 50. On the API tiers the meter counts end-customer portals instead, at 5 on Starter, 25 on Growth and 100 on Scale. Each standard API tier can add one pack of extra label portals through support, sized by tier at 5 on Starter, 10 on Growth and 25 on Scale. Past one pack the answer is the next tier up rather than a second pack, and past the top of the published ladder it is a custom deal, whose numbers are not public.

An operation running thousands of single-label artists is exactly the case bulk label pricing exists for, and the pricing page is where that conversation starts. The WordPress plugin and the public API both serve release pages and pre-saves from the same data, so the catalogue can live on your own site as well as in the portal.

Engine is a documented REST API with three published tiers plus Custom API, and every starting price is on the pricing page. The documentation is readable without an account. The sandbox is enabled as part of the API upgrade, so it opens once the plan is active rather than before purchase, and an active paid plan is required; the 7-day trial on the self-serve distribution plans carries no API or sandbox access.

Three meters decide which tier you are on: a track limit, a label limit counted as end-customer portals, and a monthly cap on royalties processed of $35,000, $115,000 or $350,000. Crossing the cap carries no overage fee, because sustained excess is a conversation about the next tier rather than a bill. Custom API sets its own royalty cap with a per-track overage.

LabelGrid supports DDEX ERN 3.8.2, 4.3.0, 4.3.1 and 4.3.2 on delivery, on every distribution plan. DDEX ERN import, as a one-time catalogue load or a continuous SFTP or S3 feed, runs on the API plans and on Custom Distribution, with a one-time setup fee wherever it is enabled. Revelator publish catalogue import and export “via DDEX, CSV, or XML”, and a 2026 newsroom post of theirs says they “upgraded all Spotify distribution feeds to the latest DDEX ERN 4.3 standard”.

Published tiers

Starter, Growth and Scale carry their prices on the pricing page, and Custom API its starting price.

Royalty processing cap

Up to $35,000, $115,000 or $350,000 in royalties processed a month by tier, with no overage fee when you cross it.

End-customer portals

5 on Starter, 25 on Growth and 100 on Scale, counted as end-customer portals rather than your own labels.

Open-source tooling

An MIT MCP server on npm, listed on the public MCP registry, plus a CLI over the same API.

All three of these are about what a company publishes, which is the currency the rest of this page is denominated in. Each one is a document of theirs you can read today, and on the first of them they beat us outright.

Revelator’s Terms § 7.4 allow a withdrawal to PayPal “once your Revelator Credit Account balance has a minimum amount of five dollars ($5.00 U.S.)” plus any applicable PayPal transaction fees. That is their published floor on the PayPal route rather than on every payout method. LabelGrid’s Terms reserve a minimum payout threshold shown in your dashboard rather than published, and as of September 2026 none is in effect. Theirs is the figure you can read before you sign, and on this row they win.

Their help centre publishes a country-by-country table of supported payment methods, under the columns COUNTRY, WIRE TRANSFER, E-CHECK / LOCAL BANK TRANSFER, CHECK, PAYPAL and INTERCASH, with their own caption noting that “Thresholds change periodically, so use the following table as a general guideline.” Their global payments page names Tipalti, PayPal and Bamboo behind it. If how a collaborator in a particular country gets paid decides your choice, go and read that table before you commit to anyone.

Their DSP help article carries sections headed “Upcoming DSPs – Integrations in Progress” and “Negotiating / Prospective DSPs”, so a prospect can see which platforms are being worked on and which are still under discussion. Their own headings say those are not live yet, which is the point: the roadmap is published as a roadmap. If that visibility matters to your planning, it is a reason to pick them.

We keep this section in every comparison we publish; a comparison you cannot trust is worth nothing.

Choose Revelator for the three things their own documents settle before you sign. Their Terms § 7.4 put a $5.00 minimum balance on a PayPal withdrawal. Their help centre publishes a country-by-country table of payout methods, so you can check how a collaborator in a particular country gets paid. Their DSP article publishes which platform integrations are in progress and which are still being negotiated. Each of those is a published artefact you can read before you commit.

Choose them too if you want a parent-child account tree, where a label customer sits above a supervised tier of artists, rather than a flat set of workspaces.

Their product pages also cover more ground than this comparison does. Anything we have not sourced from them here is on their own site, and that is the place to read it.

Price before contact

Every self-serve plan and every API tier carries its price on our pricing page.

You are integrating

The docs are public, the tiers are priced, and the sandbox opens once your plan is active.

Flat fee, published rate

From Custom Distribution up you keep 95% on our standard-DSP deals and 100% on your own.

Non-exclusive licence

You may distribute the same content elsewhere at the same time, during the term and after it.

Ask these of us as readily as of them. The answers are the comparison.

01Ask where the fee schedule lives, on a public page or in the dashboard after signup, and whether the company reserves the right to amend it without notice to you.

02Ask what the percentage is a percentage of: gross receipts, receipts net of third-party deductions, or revenue after a separately charged platform fee. Then ask for that definition in writing.

03Ask whether manual release review is included on every plan or sold as an add-on, and who does it, because a delivery rejected three weeks before release date costs more than the fee.

04Ask how you reach a test environment: is there a sandbox, does getting to it mean emailing a representative, and does it open before or after the plan is paid for?

05Ask which DDEX ERN versions are supported per feed rather than in general, whether catalogue import over DDEX costs extra, and which plans it is available on.

06Ask what happens to your catalogue if you leave: does ownership stay with you, is the licence non-exclusive, and may you use another distributor for the same stores at the same time?

07Ask what happens to your integration when the API changes: whether breaking changes are versioned, where the changelog is published, and whether the client libraries are open source or closed.

Every self-serve distribution plan and every API tier is priced on the pricing page, the Engine documentation is public, and Imprint is scoped and quoted at onboarding. Each Revelator value in the table above comes from one of the pages linked beneath it, read on 23 September 2026. If any of it is wrong, tell us and we will fix it.