DMCA.com
Best for: A website owner, a business, or anyone with a single dispute to resolve rather than a recurring flow of leaked content across dozens of hosts.
Pricing reality: DMCA.com prices by product line rather than by plan. Protection badge from $10/mo or $100/year, rising to $20/mo for publishers and $50/mo for user-generated-content sites. DIY takedowns at $10/mo or $100/year, where you file the notices. Full-service takedowns are per notice: Standard $199 for 1-9, $179 each at 10-25, $165 each at 26-50; Premium $399 / $359 / $330; Platinum $599 / $539 / $497. Monitoring from $10/mo, with image monitoring quoted at $1 per image per month.
What it does better: DMCA.com is the only service in this comparison that will take one infringement, handle it, and never bill you again. It also sells the compliance side — agent designation, case handling, a badge — which no creator-focused competitor offers at all. For a business with a single matter, that is a better fit than any subscription.
What makes people leave: Buyers of the full-service tier describe paying the per-notice fee and getting rounds of unanswered notices, in one reviewer's words, despite paying nearly $200, they kept sending notices that were not getting answers, rinse and repeat until they essentially turned around to me and said 'time's up' trustpilot.com on DMCA.com
Verdict: DMCA.com scales against the leak problem rather than with it. At $199 for up to nine notices, a scan returning 400 URLs is a five-figure quote. The badge and compliance products are a different business and are priced sensibly for it.
The objections worth taking seriously
- 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
- 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
There is nothing to migrate from DMCA.com, and that is the point
A DMCA.com full-service takedown is a purchase, not a subscription. Nothing overlaps, nothing has to be cancelled, and no billing cycle has to be timed. If you bought a block of notices and the block is spent, you are already free.
Keep the badge if you have one. The $10-a-month badge product sits on your own website and does nothing that conflicts with a leak-removal subscription elsewhere. There is no reason to cancel it and it is cheap. Treat it as a separate purchase, because it is one.
What carries over. The URLs you submitted and whatever correspondence you have. If you kept a sheet of the links you sent DMCA.com and the dates — and anyone who has paid per notice has counted them carefully, because each one cost money — that sheet is your case record. It is worth more than most people think and nothing about starting elsewhere makes it redundant. Paste those URLs in as manual submissions.
What does not. DMCA.com publishes no export of case history, so the record of what was sent and what came back stays there. Download or screenshot anything in your case log before the account lapses.
The arithmetic worth doing once. Count the URLs in your last scan. Divide by nine. Multiply by $199. Compare that to twelve months of a monthly plan. For most creators the comparison is not close in either direction — it is a different product for a different problem, and the number makes that obvious faster than any argument.
The step-by-step version of this, with the timing and the export order: how to migrate from DMCA.com.
Why a leak problem is a routing problem and a single dispute is not
One infringement on one host is a letter. You find the abuse contact, you write the notice, you send it, and either it works or it does not. Buying that as a service makes sense and DMCA.com sells it competently.
Four hundred URLs across thirty hosts is a different job, and the difficulty is not volume — it is that the thirty hosts behave differently and you cannot tell which is which from the outside. 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. Where a host's 90-day removal rate sits below 25% across at least five resolved samples, the URL skips two email rounds and goes straight to search de-listing, because two more notices to a host that has never answered one is nine days of nothing and, on a per-notice product, $398 of nothing.
That corpus is also why the marginal cost of the four-hundredth URL is near zero for openDMCA and is $199 per nine for a per-notice product. The pricing models are not competing; they are describing two different problems.
The other half of the post this page replaces covered Ceartas, which is a creator product and a genuine competitor. That comparison lives at openDMCA and Ceartas on per-creator pricing.
Line-by-line pricing, including the tiers and caps this page does not have room for: the per-notice arithmetic across all four DMCA.com product lines.
The estimate below uses 400 live copies — the count at which a per-notice product stops being a purchase and becomes a budget line.