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How does pricing work on Catch+Release?

Our pricing guide can be viewed below, providing full transparency on what you get with Catch+Release.

K
Written by Katie Shanks
Updated this week

We’ve designed our pricing to be clear and flexible, with services that support you from creative discovery through licensing. This guide breaks down available services, what each costs, and when you might need them.

For license pricing, visit ourPricing Page or use ourProject Cost Calculator to explore your campaign’s potential cost.

🎯 Curation Support

Looking for help finding the right content? Our Curation team offers two service tiers based on your needs:

Curation Type

Price

When It Applies

Complex Delivery

$4,200 per project

Best option for highly unique projects where the content you need for your campaign has specific factors ( such as brand, sound byte, location).

Topic Delivery

$950 per topic

Designed for your creative control. You choose and define the "Topics" you'd like the curators to search. Remember Topics can represent multiple visual ideas, but are usually bound to one overall concept. Each topic delivery includes around 20 thoughtfully selected assets to suit your needs.


🛠️ Managed Services

Catch+Release Managed Services are specialized professional services provided by our Customer Success team to clients who need additional project support.

Service Level

Price

When It Applies

< 20 Licenses

$5,000

When you have a small-to-mid-size project and want Catch+Release to run point on sourcing, clearance, and rights negotiation.

> 20 Licenses

$15,000

For campaigns that require 20+ licenses, especially when involving sensitive, celebrity, or sports-related content that adds legal/operational complexity.

Custom Projects

Varies

We tailor services for large campaigns, international use cases, or clients with internal approval layers. Contact your Account Executive for a quote.


🧾 Clearance Fees & Add-Ons

Use this section to understand how specific services are priced during and after the clearance process. All prices are per shot.

Service

Price

When It Applies

Shot Clearance

$250

$0 for Creator Community content

We attempt to identify all rights-holders who own or appear in the content and obtain their permission to use it for your project.

Re-Clearance

$150

Changes to the usage that impact the creator’s payout or require additional rights holders to be cleared, such as changes to rights packages, term length, exclusivity, or clip time codes.

While shots from the Catch+Release Creator Community are free to clear initially, if re-clearance is required, they will incur a $150 re-clearance fee.

Expedited Clearance

$150

If you need your shots cleared in 3 or fewer business days, Expedited Clearance bumps your request to the front of the line to meet your deadline.

For example:

  • If your deadline is end of day Friday, rush Clearance will apply if you request clearance after 6:00 PM ET on Tuesday — because that leaves just Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday to complete the work.

  • If your deadline is end of day Tuesday, expedieted Clearance fees will apply if you request clearance after 6:00 PM ET on Thursday — because that leaves just Friday, Monday, and Tuesday to complete the work.

We consider your due date a full working day — meaning we assume shots can be cleared up until 6:00 PM ET on your deadline. If you need shots cleared earlier in the day (for example, by Friday at 12:00 PM ET), then that day does not count as a working day and you’ll need to request clearance by 6:00 PM ET on Monday to avoid the Expedited Clearance fee.

This ensures we have a full 3-business-day window to process your request under our standard timeline. Weekends and holidays are excluded.

Sensitive Clearance

$500

Sensitive Clearance refers to the process of securing legal and ethical permission to use third-party content in scenarios where the context of use could be seen as negative, critical, controversial, or reputationally harmful to the individuals or entities featured. This type of clearance is substantially more difficult than standard content licensing and often involves heightened legal review and prolonged negotiations with rights holders and talent representatives.

Clearance is considered sensitive when the intended use:

  • Depicts individuals or communities in an unflattering or questionable light

  • Imposes a narrative that implies wrongdoing, irresponsibility, or failure

  • Associates people, brands, or behaviors with stigmatized, divisive, or emotionally charged themes

Success is not guaranteed and, if possible, typically requires clear narrative justification, increased compensation, and extraordinary care in managing legal and reputational risk.

Examples

  1. A campaign features videos of teens behaving badly—vandalizing property or engaging in reckless challenges on social media—juxtaposed with a brand message encouraging parental vigilance. Though visually compelling, the context implies moral failure or lack of control, making clearance highly sensitive.

  2. An insurance commercial uses footage of flooded homes and distraught families, alongside messaging about the dangers of not having adequate coverage. While the content may be authentic and newsworthy, the emotional distress and potential exploitation of real-life suffering make it ethically and legally sensitive to clear.

  3. A fintech brand promotes its fraud protection services using clips of elderly people appearing confused at ATMs or being scammed over the phone. Even if these clips are sourced from public platforms, the implied vulnerability of older adults can be interpreted as ageist or demeaning, triggering reputational risk and higher clearance barriers.

High Profile Clearance

$1,000

Content featuring or owned by high-profile IPs such as actors, athletes, film and TV clips, musicians, commercially released music, and sports footage.

Additional IP Requirements

$150

We obtain additional information from IP rightsholders that falls outside the scope of a normal clearance. Examples: confirming if models are age 25 or older at the time the content was captured for an alcohol brand, confirming that content was captured in the state of Minnesota for a tourism campaign.

SAG Talent Coordination

$150 (per licensed shot)

If the production falls under SAG-AFTRA jurisdiction and SAG agreements are required for all visible individuals in the cleared content, Catch+Release will contact each person after final content selects are confirmed. They’ll be introduced to the agency or paymaster handling the SAG-AFTRA paperwork and next steps.

Reputation Check

$250

We conduct a light review (up to 3 pages in Google results) of rightsholders’ digital footprints to check for problematic or controversial posts, articles, etc.

Post-License Follow-Up

$150 (per licensed shot)

We ask the copyright owner to conduct special actions post-licensing, such as liking, commenting, or reposting the brand’s post that features their licensed content.


🔁 Cancellation & Refund Policy

Cancellation policy: If you cancel a shot within 24 hours of submitting it for clearance, any fees paid for clearance, add-ons, or other services specifically tied to that shot will be refunded—as long as clearance hasn’t already been completed. However, if the shot reaches a “Ready to License” status within that 24-hour window, then no refunds will be issued, as the services have already been fulfilled.


🤝 Still Have Questions?

We’re here to help you make informed decisions about what’s right for your project. Reach out to your Customer Success Manager or email us at success@catchandrelease.com.

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