Ceartas
Best for: Staying, if you are on Elite or higher and the uncapped manual submissions are doing work, or if you are mid-period.
Pricing reality: Star $69, Elite $169, VIP $349 and Platinum $1,200, each per creator per month, with 50% off the first month. VIP has an annual option at $3,120. Cancellation is self-serve at any time; the terms of service state that all purchases are non-refundable, so an unused portion of a paid period is not returned.
What it does better: Ceartas publishes the commercial terms rather than leaving them to a support conversation — the refund position, the cancellation route and a price at every service level. A term you dislike but can read beats a term you have to ask about, and most of this category makes you ask.
What makes people leave: Per-creator pricing with no published roster plan, so a manager with ten creators runs ten subscriptions, combined with non-refundable terms that make a bad month unrecoverable ceartas.io on Ceartas
Verdict: A clean exit if you time it and an expensive one if you do not. The date matters more than any comparison on this site.
The objections worth taking seriously
- Will the charge match the price on the page, and can I actually cancel?
- Every openDMCA price on the pricing page is read from the same config that drives Stripe checkout, so the number you read is the number you are charged. Cancellation is self-serve from the dashboard, with no retention call and no ticket. The openDMCA cancellation and refund terms
- 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
- Will filing put my legal name in front of the people who leaked me?
- A valid notice has to identify a complainant, and openDMCA is the named agent on it rather than your home address. Nothing about your identity handling is left to a promise — the security page describes what openDMCA stores about you and where it goes. How openDMCA handles creator identity and account data
Work backwards from the renewal date, then do the export
Two weeks before renewal: run the comparison. Not now, not mid-cycle. Free scans on your main stage name at whatever alternatives you are weighing, and the twenty-URL check on links Ceartas reports as handled. Do this while you are still paying, because a live account is what makes the comparison meaningful.
One week before renewal: export by hand. Ceartas publishes no takedown-history export, so this is manual. Copy out every creator on the account, every stage name under each, your whitelist, and your manual submission list. If you have been on Star you have been rationing 300 manual requests, which means you know exactly which links mattered — that list is the most considered artefact you own here and it took months to build. It is not wasted work and no automation replaces it. It becomes the starting state of whatever comes next.
Three days before renewal: cancel. Not on the day, in case anything needs a support reply, and not three weeks early, because non-refundable means you paid for the rest of the period either way.
If you manage a roster, do the arithmetic on paper first. Ceartas prices per creator with no published multi-creator plan, so ten creators on Star is $690 a month and ten on Elite is $1,690. openDMCA Agency publishes $229 a month with ten creators included, and Pro covers three at $89. That single comparison is the whole reason most agency switches happen, and it is worth having the number written down before you talk to anyone on either side.
Whitelist before the first new scan. Your own domains and your creators' collaborators', loaded before anything is filed. Fifteen minutes.
The tier-by-tier prices are at Ceartas's published ladder and its caps, and the capability comparison at openDMCA and Ceartas compared.
What a hand-built submission list is worth once it is routed
A list of links you chose deliberately, under a cap, is better input than an undifferentiated scan dump. It is filtered by judgement — you spent a limited resource on the links that mattered — and that judgement transfers even though the vendor's records do not.
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. A pasted URL inherits the same routing as a scanned one: escalation through host DMCA, an escalation template, the provider or CDN, then search de-listing, with a host below a 25% removal rate over ninety days across at least five resolved samples skipping straight to the last rung.
It is also worth pasting in links you believe were already handled. openDMCA re-checks removed URLs on a daily sweep, so anything that came back reopens as a new case rather than staying closed. Reuploads are the main reason a creator's own notes and a vendor's dashboard stop agreeing, and a migration is when that gap becomes visible.
What you lose. Uncapped manual submissions as a named product, a published ladder above $229 a month, a concierge relationship, and 27 public reviews — a small sample, and 27 more than openDMCA has. openDMCA's own refund position is also published as generally non-refundable, with a good-faith review if you write about a charge inside 14 days, which is a softer version of the same term rather than a different one.
The estimate below assumes 230 live copies at the point of a switch for an established single creator.