Too Lost Alternative: Read the Price Before the Conversation

Short answer: LabelGrid and Too Lost both charge a flat fee, so the difference is not the fee model. It is where the published price stops, and what the contract says the percentage is a percentage of. Too Lost publishes artist and label subscriptions and per-call API quotas in the API reference on its ‘Beta Version’ developer portal; the Enterprise Suite is ‘Contact Sales’. LabelGrid publishes every distribution plan and API tier and the share each keeps. Every Too Lost value in the table below comes from their own pages, linked beneath it.

Too Lost’s published prices stop at the Label subscription and the $999-a-month API tier in the API reference on its ‘Beta Version’ developer portal; the Enterprise deal that carries bulk ingestion, royalty processing and the White Label Dashboard is ‘Contact Sales’. LabelGrid publishes every distribution plan and every API tier, and the share you keep is a term of the plan applied to net revenue received from the DSPs rather than an allocation made at the company’s discretion.

Products on one backend

DDEX ERN versions

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

Founded

Each Too Lost value below is taken from one of their own published pages, linked beneath the table with the date we read them: the pricing page, the help centre, the Terms of Use and the developer docs.

Each of the 16 Too Lost values above is sourced from their own published pages, read 2026-09-17: developer.toolost.com/docs, developer.toolost.com/docs/api#description/usage-quotas-rate-limits, help.toolost.com/hc/en-us/articles/360054816991-When-Do-I-Receive-My-Royalties, help.toolost.com/hc/en-us/articles/360054818371-How-Much-Does-Too-Lost-Cost, help.toolost.com/hc/en-us/articles/360055480812-How-Do-I-Set-Up-a-Royalty-Split, help.toolost.com/hc/en-us/articles/42465732343188-What-Services-Does-Too-Lost-Offer, help.toolost.com/hc/en-us/articles/42543955936916-How-Do-I-Upload-Dolby-Atmos-Files-Through-Too-Lost, help.toolost.com/hc/en-us/articles/45091220772500-Does-Too-Lost-Take-a-Cut-of-My-Earnings, toolost.com/about/, toolost.com/features/team-management, toolost.com/news/article/a-letter-from-our-ceo, toolost.com/pricing, toolost.com/terms. Dimensions we could not source from one of their primary pages are omitted rather than guessed.

Too Lost deserves credit here. The Artist and Label subscriptions are on their help centre, the API quotas are in the API reference on developer.toolost.com, a portal marked ‘Beta Version’, and the Terms of Use are public. The line we draw is where that stops. Bulk ingestion, royalty processing, the White Label Dashboard and custom DSP contract configuration sit in an Enterprise deal that is ‘Contact Sales’, so the customer with the most at stake is the one who cannot read the price. LabelGrid publishes every distribution plan and every API tier on the pricing page.

The consequence is practical. You can size the cost, read the API documentation without a login, and know what share of royalties the plan retains, and of what, before anyone at LabelGrid knows your name. The limit is also plain: a B2B account with us is still a conversation, Custom API is sized in it, and Imprint, the LabelGrid white-label portal, is quoted separately.

The price list

Every distribution plan and every API tier, including the Custom Distribution and Custom API starting prices; Imprint is quoted separately.

The documentation

The LabelGrid API documentation is public with no login and no app request; Too Lost’s developer docs are public too.

The tooling

The MCP server is open source on npm under MIT and the command-line tool ships from the same repository, readable before either touches your catalogue.

This page

Each Too Lost value in the table comes from one of the pages listed beneath it, with the date we read them.

The LabelGrid WordPress plugin syncs your catalogue to your own site, and the open-source MCP server and command-line tool on npm run on the same public API. Show your releases on your site, script them from the terminal, or ask your own AI client about them.

Too Lost’s Artist Account is $2.99/month or $19.99/year and the Label Account is $5.99/month or $35.99/year, and their Quality Control team reviews each release before it is delivered. LabelGrid’s self-serve plans (Solo, Basic and Pro) are flat yearly fees with a 7-day free trial, and 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. 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.

Retention is where Too Lost is cheaper for one artist or a small label: while you are subscribed you receive 100% of your master-recording royalties, minus taxes and payment processing fees, and LabelGrid’s Solo, Basic and Pro retain 85%, 85% and 90%. Their Terms of Use then say what that 100% is 100% of. ‘Net Income’ is ‘calculated only on amounts attributable to End User Content and excludes Platform Access Fees, which Company retains’, and is struck after licensing fees, administration fees, store deductions, taxes, processing costs, chargebacks, reserves and risk adjustments. The Company ‘may determine, in its sole discretion, the portion of Gross Receipts properly attributable to End User Content’, and ‘may, in its sole discretion, allocate up to one hundred percent (100%) of Net Income to You’. The mirror is ours to give in the same breath: if a LabelGrid subscription lapses for more than 60 days we may withdraw the content and suspend the account, on any plan, and LabelGrid also withholds royalties and holds reserves where it suspects infringement.

Both companies deduct costs before they pay, and both reserve against fraud. What differs is the standing of the percentage: LabelGrid’s retention is a published term of the plan, applied to net revenue LabelGrid receives from the DSPs, while Too Lost’s is a discretionary allocation of a base the company determines. That is the whole claim.

Audio

Dolby Atmos and Hi-Res delivery are in every LabelGrid distribution plan; Too Lost includes Atmos at no extra cost as well.

Rights

Both offer YouTube Content ID; on LabelGrid, UGC and Content ID monetisation carries a 20% fee on revenue earned through LabelGrid’s deals.

Splits

Automated royalty splits from Basic up and on every API tier, not on Solo or GATE.

Review

Quality, metadata and rights are checked by a person on every distribution plan before delivery, unless the account distributes only through its own direct deals.

Payouts

LabelGrid charges no fee of its own to issue a payout; Too Lost subtracts the payout provider’s processing fee from each transfer.

A Too Lost Label Account puts your artists under one account with team roles, and the White Label Dashboard sits inside the Enterprise deal. The LabelGrid model is flat: every customer, artist or label, is its own complete workspace, and Imprint puts those workspaces under your brand. Neither shape is free.

A Too Lost Label Account is $5.99/month or $35.99/year, they describe it as unlimited artists under one account, and team management lets you ‘invite team members, assign roles, and control who has access to what across your account’. If you run a roster and want one login and one subscription across all of it, that is the stronger shape, and it is priced on the page.

Each LabelGrid customer, artist or label, gets its own portal login, catalogue, analytics and earnings, partitioned from every other, and you as the reseller see across all of them. The cost is plain: a label customer does not get a tier of artists beneath it to supervise, because an artist who wants their own label becomes their own customer through self-serve signup on your domain. Imprint puts that portal under your brand.

The standard API tiers add label portals in packs through support, five on Starter, ten on Growth and twenty-five on Scale; Custom Distribution has no label pack. If your business is thousands of artists each running a single label, that ladder was not built for you, so we price it as a custom deal. Caps, platform fees, bulk label pricing and contract terms are negotiable, and in special cases so is retention. The numbers are agreed under NDA.

Whichever shape you run, the ladder on the pricing page is the floor of the conversation rather than its ceiling. Too Lost’s Enterprise Suite is the same kind of conversation; ours starts from a number you can already read.

developer.toolost.com is a public API portal, marked ‘Beta Version’: OAuth 2.0 Authorization Code with PKCE, scopes including write:releases, a sandbox at api-sandbox.toolost.com/v1 with separate credentials, and three tiers metered per call. Those tiers sit in the API reference on the developer portal rather than on the Too Lost pricing page: Free is $0 a month for 5,000 calls, Starter $99 a month for 250,000 and Scale $999 for 3,000,000, with per-call overage above the paid quotas. Production access follows an app request: ‘An admin will review and approve it.’ As published today, the API reference lists one endpoint group, ‘Endpoints for retrieving authenticated user information’, while their developers page offers music distribution, catalog management and royalty tracking through the same API.

Engine, the LabelGrid API, meters something else. Its documentation is public with no login, three standard tiers are published as flat yearly fees, Custom API starts from one, and API calls are not metered. Each standard tier carries a track limit, a label limit and a monthly royalty processing cap; settle above the cap and you move up a tier, with no overage charge, so the platform fee steps with your volume and does not become a percentage of it. A sandbox comes with every API plan once the plan is active, API partners go through onboarding screening and KYC/KYB, and delivery is DDEX ERN 3.8.2, 4.3.0, 4.3.1 and 4.3.2. The MCP server on the same API, @labelgrid/mcp, is open source under MIT and listed on the public MCP registry, with the @labelgrid/cli command-line tool alongside it.

Calls

Not metered on LabelGrid. Too Lost meters production calls, with quotas and overage published in the API reference on its ‘Beta Version’ developer portal.

Tracks and labels

Each standard API tier has a track limit and a label limit; label packs are five on Starter, ten on Growth, twenty-five on Scale.

Royalties

Each standard tier carries a monthly royalty processing cap; settle above it and you move up a tier, with no overage charge.

Sandbox

With every LabelGrid API plan once it is active. Too Lost issues sandbox credentials from its Developer Portal and does not meter sandbox traffic.

Here is where Too Lost is the stronger answer, as their own pages describe it.

For one artist or a small label, Too Lost costs less to begin with: an Artist Account is $2.99/month or $19.99/year, a Label Account $5.99/month or $35.99/year, and while you are subscribed ‘Too Lost does not take a cut of the earnings from your master recording’, minus taxes and payment processing fees. LabelGrid’s Solo, Basic and Pro retain 85%, 85% and 90%. At that size, their subscription is the better deal.

Too Lost’s homepage offers an Instant Royalty Advance, ‘early access of up to 10 years of future earnings from your music catalog and upcoming releases’, with offers shown in the Too Lost Wallet. LabelGrid does not fund advances. If capital against your catalogue is part of what you want from a distributor, talk to them.

Too Lost offers publishing administration in partnership with BMG; under a Too Lost Publishing deal “you retain 85% of the royalties generated from your compositions”. LabelGrid does not administer publishing. If you want master and composition royalties collected through one account, that is a real reason to choose them.

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

Choose Too Lost if you are one artist or a small label who wants the lower published entry price of the two and 100% of master royalties while subscribed; if you want an advance against future royalties or publishing administration through BMG alongside distribution; or if you want your whole roster under one account with team roles rather than a workspace per customer. Those are real strengths, and the self-serve prices are on the page.

Choose LabelGrid if the situations on the right describe you. What they share is that your business is larger than a subscription.

You have outgrown a subscription

Custom Distribution and every API tier are published as flat yearly fees, retaining 95% on our standard-DSP deals and 100% on yours.

You want the plan in writing

Retention is a published plan term, the distribution licence is non-exclusive, and no exclusivity survives after you leave.

You build on an API

Public docs, unmetered calls, tiers sized by a royalty processing cap, a sandbox with the plan, and an open-source MCP server.

You run a white label

Every customer is its own workspace, Imprint puts the portal on your domain, and a custom deal covers the model a ladder does not.

Put these to whoever you are evaluating, and to us.

01What moves my bill as I grow: a track count, a label count, my monthly royalties, or the number of API calls I make? Ask for the whole ladder, including the top of it.

02Can I read the price for my size of business without a sales call, and at which plan does the published price stop?

03What is the percentage a percentage OF, and is it a term of the plan or a decision the company makes? Ask which deductions come off before the split, and what the rate becomes if I stop subscribing.

04Is release review included in the plan, and does every release go through it before delivery?

05What does leaving cost? Ask whether the licence is exclusive, whether any exclusivity survives termination, and how much notice either side owes.

06Which DDEX ERN versions do you deliver, and to which DSPs? If the answer is not on the page, ask why it is not.

07Is there a sandbox, when do I get it, and is the AI tooling I would connect to my catalogue open source so I can read it before I connect it?

Every distribution plan and every API tier is priced on the pricing page, the API documentation is public, and Imprint, the white-label portal, is quoted separately, after qualification. Every Too Lost value in the table above comes from one of the pages linked beneath it, with the date we read them. If anything here is out of date or wrong, tell us and we will correct it.