openDMCA free tools
Best for: Anyone with a small, countable number of leaked URLs, or anyone who wants to understand the process before paying for it.
Pricing reality: Free, with no account, no email gate and no truncation. Each tool returns its complete result — the actual abuse address, the full copyable notice, the whole de-listing submission text. The one deliberate exception is the free username scan, which returns per-source counts rather than the leaked URLs themselves.
What it does better: Free tools beat every paid service on one axis that matters: you can verify the output. A notice you can read is a notice you can check, and it is the fastest way to find out whether a paid service is producing anything different.
What makes people leave: They do not monitor. Nothing runs while you sleep, nothing re-checks a removed URL, and nothing notices a reupload — which is the failure mode that makes one-shot takedowns fail in the first place opendmca.com on openDMCA free tools
Verdict: Enough for a small, static problem. Not enough for a recurring one, and the boundary is roughly where you start keeping a spreadsheet.
Bruqi
Best for: A permanently free tier from a paid vendor, useful as a second scanner.
Pricing reality: Bruqi's DIY tier is free with no expiry: monthly basic scans and removal resources, and in Bruqi's own words no automatic removals. Paid tiers start at $29 a month.
What it does better: It is the only free tier among the paid services here that does not expire, which makes it usable indefinitely as a second opinion against whatever else you run.
What makes people leave: The free tier files nothing for you, and the recurring complaint on the paid tiers is de-listing counted as removal — in one reviewer's words, they say 399 links are delisted but when i google them they still come up trustpilot.com on Bruqi
Verdict: Worth keeping open at zero cost regardless of who you pay.
BranditScan
Best for: Trying a full paid product without entering a card.
Pricing reality: A free leak check described as needing no signup and taking about ten seconds, plus a seven-day trial that BranditScan states needs no credit card. Paid plans are $69 and $149 a month.
What it does better: The seven-day no-card trial is the only way in this comparison to watch a paid takedown engine work without paying, which is a materially different thing from a free scan.
What makes people leave: Seven days is long enough to judge what a service finds and far too short to judge what it removes, because hosts answer notices on a scale of days to weeks branditscan.com on BranditScan
Verdict: Use the trial for coverage, not for outcomes.
Privly
Best for: A no-card trial with a published limit rather than an unstated one.
Pricing reality: A seven-day free trial that Privly states needs no credit card, limited to one scan across a claimed 10,000+ leak sites and up to three uploads. The paid plan is $49 a month flat.
What it does better: Privly publishes what the trial actually includes — one scan, three uploads — rather than describing it as full access and leaving you to discover the edges.
What makes people leave: One scan is a snapshot, and Privly has no public reviews at all, so a trial is the only evidence available about it in either direction trustpilot.com on Privly
Verdict: A cheap, honest look. Not enough on its own to decide from.
The objections worth taking seriously
- Do I have to upload my leaked content to your servers?
- No. A openDMCA scan takes a username, not a file. Reference images are optional and only used if you choose face or image matching, and the privacy policy states plainly what is stored and for how long. What openDMCA stores, and what it never asks you for
- Is this a scam, like half the category?
- Fair question, and the honest answer is that openDMCA cannot prove it with a testimonial. What it can do is publish the instrument: a notice under 17 U.S.C. §512 is the same one studios file, openDMCA acts as your authorised agent, and the policy that binds openDMCA to that role is public. Read the openDMCA DMCA policy, including the counter-notice route
- Does any of this work, or is it emails into a void?
- Some hosts never comply, and openDMCA does not pretend otherwise. Instead it measures each host's removal rate over 90 days and fast-paths hosts below 25% compliance, with at least five resolved samples, straight to search de-listing rather than burning two email rounds on them. The manual version of the same process, published in full
The eight free DMCA tools, and what each one actually returns
Each of these returns its complete result to an anonymous visitor. No blurring, no truncated preview, no email required to see the answer. A free tool that withholds the output is an advertisement, and there was no version of this page worth publishing that linked to one.
- DMCA notice generator — Produces the full, copyable §512(c)(3) notice for a URL you paste in.
- Abuse contact lookup — Returns the actual abuse address or form URL for a host, not a hint that one exists.
- Google de-listing request builder — Builds the TCRP-format submission text and CSV that Google's removal process expects.
- Who hosts this site — Resolves the host and CDN behind a leak URL, which decides who the notice goes to.
- DMCA or NCII decision tree — Works out whether your case is a copyright matter, a non-consensual imagery matter, or both.
- Is it still indexed — Checks whether a URL you had de-listed has come back into search results.
- Bing removal request builder — The same job as the Google builder, for the index most people forget.
- Piracy loss estimator — An estimate, with its assumptions rendered on screen, of what exposure is costing you.
The order to use them in. Paste a leak URL into the host lookup to find out who is actually responsible. Run that host through the abuse contact lookup to get the address or form. Generate the notice. Send it. A week later, run the de-listing builder for anything still in search, and use the index checker to confirm what happened. That sequence is the whole manual method and it costs nothing.
The one thing that is deliberately incomplete. The free username scan returns per-source counts rather than the leaked URLs themselves. That is not a tease. Handing a list of someone's leaked links to an anonymous visitor would help the people distributing them, and for non-consensual imagery it would be indefensible. Every other number on that screen is real; the links are the one thing held back, on purpose.
Where free stops working. Not at a URL count — at a shape. It stops when the same content reappears after you removed it, when you are tracking thirty hosts with different channels, and when the job needs doing on a schedule rather than on a Sunday. If you are already keeping a spreadsheet, you have crossed that line, and the spreadsheet is the evidence.
The full manual method, written out step by step and free: the openDMCA removal guides.
Why openDMCA gives away the first two hops of its own product
The abuse contact lookup and the notice generator are not marketing artefacts built beside the product. They are the product's first two steps, extracted and made public, and they return exactly what the paid pipeline returns.
That is a deliberate trade. openDMCA routes every infringing URL through the Removal Graph — a live map of which hosts actually remove content, how fast, and through which channel — so each takedown takes the shortest path that has historically worked for that host. Hops one and two of that graph are resolving the host and resolving its abuse channel, and giving them away costs almost nothing because the value is not in either hop. It is in the corpus that decides which channel to use for a host that ignored the first notice, and in the daily sweep that reopens a removed URL when it comes back.
So the honest framing of this page is: the free tools do the part that is easy to automate once. The subscription does the part that only works if something is running continuously and remembering what happened last time. If your problem does not need memory, you do not need the subscription, and openDMCA would rather say that than sell you one.
What the free route costs you. Time, and the reuploads you never see. A creator filing by hand catches what she looks for; nothing catches what she does not. That gap is invisible by construction, which is exactly why it is easy to underestimate.
The estimate below assumes 45 live copies — roughly the point at which filing by hand stops being an evening and starts being a habit.