Is DistroKid free?
No. DistroKid has no free plan and no free trial for releasing music. The cheapest way in is the Musician plan, a yearly subscription with unlimited uploads.
“Free” can mean two things here. As a way to release music, DistroKid isn’t free: there’s no free plan and no free trial, and the cheapest plan, Musician, costs $24.99/yr. Around the edges, some things are free. Anyone can make a HyperFollow page, and students and invited collaborators get 50% off their first year. If your budget for distribution is truly zero, you need a different distributor. This covers US prices and DistroKid’s policies as of Sep 24, 2026.
What the cheapest DistroKid plan costs
The cheapest DistroKid plan is Musician, at $24.99/yr, billed once a year. It covers unlimited uploads under one artist or band name, and DistroKid keeps 0% of your store royalties on it. DistroKid’s pricing page also shows a monthly figure, but every plan is paid yearly, up front. The subscription keeps your music in stores: if you stop paying, DistroKid sends notice and then removes your releases, unless a release has the Leave a Legacy extra. The source is DistroKid’s pricing page, checked Sep 24, 2026.
So it isn’t something you can pay for once, release a song and cancel. Well, you can, but the song comes down. DistroKid’s page on a lapsed fee spells that out.
The flip side is that one fee covers everything you upload that year. Release one single and it’s the full price for one song. Release ten and each one costs a tenth of that. If you’re unsure which kind of year you’re about to have, our DistroKid pricing guide walks through the other two plans, the per-release extras and what a real yearly bill looks like.
None of that is free. A few other parts of DistroKid are.
DistroKid free tools: what costs nothing
DistroKid’s free parts are promo tools, not distribution. HyperFollow, a link page for a release with pre-saves, comes free on every plan, and anyone can claim a basic HyperFollow page without a subscription. Pages made without a subscription can’t take pre-saves and don’t update automatically when a release goes live. DistroKid’s pricing page also lists free promo tools on every plan. Putting music into Spotify, Apple Music and other stores always needs a paid plan. Even collecting a split needs someone to pay: a collaborator without a subscription can withdraw their share only if the artist covers them for a yearly fee or they sign up themselves.
DistroKid’s HyperFollow page describes the no-subscription version. It’s a decent free link-in-bio page, and that’s about it. The part that makes HyperFollow worth using, pre-saves that turn into Spotify follows, only works once you have a release coming out through DistroKid.
The Splits catch trips people up. Say a friend adds you to a song at 20%. Your money builds up in DistroKid, but you can’t withdraw it until one of you pays. DistroKid’s Splits page gives the artist the option to cover you for $10 a year. If your share earns less than that, it’s awkward math for both of you, so talk about it before the song comes out.
Free is off the table for releasing. A discount isn’t.
DistroKid discounts and trials you can actually get
DistroKid has no free trial, but four real discounts exist as of Sep 24, 2026. Students with a .edu email get 50% off their first year. Collaborators invited to a split get 50% off their first year when they sign up. New members who sign up through an existing member’s referral link get 7% off their first year. And anyone paying for FL Cloud Plus or FL Cloud Pro, Image-Line’s subscription for FL Studio, can activate a Musician plan at no extra charge while FL Cloud stays active. All four apply to new accounts, and three of the four only cut the first year.
Where each one comes from:
- Students: DistroKid’s student page. Sign up with your school email.
- Invited collaborators: the invite email, described on DistroKid’s Splits page.
- Referral links: DistroKid’s referral page. Any member can send you one, and they earn a small reward when you pay.
- FL Cloud: DistroKid’s FL Cloud page and Image-Line’s help page. It only works if you’ve never had a DistroKid account, and the free FL Cloud access bundled with FL Studio doesn’t include it.
FL Cloud is the one to think hard about. It’s only a deal if you’d pay for FL Cloud anyway. Your releases are tied to that subscription, and Image-Line says they’re removed when it ends unless you keep a separate DistroKid plan. Upgrading to Musician Plus also ends the included plan and starts a paid one.
About promo code sites: the worry that you’re overpaying because you missed a code is common, and those sites feed on it. DistroKid’s own discounts come through links, not codes. If a site promises a bigger cut than the ones above, be skeptical.
If none of those fit and your budget is zero, you’re looking for a different distributor.
Free alternatives to DistroKid
TheDebutRoom’s view is that a free distributor usually ends up costing more than a paid one once your songs earn anything, because free plans keep a share of your royalties instead of charging a fee. RouteNote Free and ONErpm both release to major stores with no upfront fee and keep 15% of what your music earns in stores. DistroKid charges a fixed yearly fee and keeps 0% of store royalties. Free plans suit a first song you’re testing or music you don’t expect to earn much. For anything you plan to keep releasing, a fixed fee is easier to plan around and cheaper at higher earnings.
Here’s the math to run with your own numbers. At a 15% cut, a free plan costs you more than $24.99/yr once your songs earn about seven times the yearly fee in a year. Most first releases never get there, which is why free plans are fine to start on. The terms are on RouteNote’s page about its free plan and ONErpm’s FAQ.
If you want to keep all your royalties but pay less than DistroKid, Ditto’s unlimited plan is $19.00/yr. Our guide to free music distribution compares the free options side by side, and the roundup of the best music distribution services covers the paid ones. The distribution hub has the rest of our DistroKid guides.
How to pay as little as possible for DistroKid
Paying the least for DistroKid takes four checks, in this order: see if you qualify for the student discount, look for a Splits invite with the collaborator discount, check whether an FL Cloud plan you already pay for includes DistroKid, and then sign up for Musician with no extras. You need your school email, your inbox and your FL Cloud login if you have one. It takes about ten minutes. Do it before you create a DistroKid account, because the discounts and the FL Cloud plan only apply to new signups.
Check for a student discount
If you have a .edu email address, sign up through DistroKid's student page for 50% off your first year. It's the biggest discount DistroKid offers, and it only works at signup.
Look for a Splits invite in your inbox
If someone added you to a split on a song, the invite email offers 50% off your first year. Sign up from that link instead of the homepage. If you only need to collect your share, ask the artist whether they'll cover you instead.
Check what your FL Cloud plan includes
If you already pay for FL Cloud Plus or FL Cloud Pro and have never had a DistroKid account, activate the included Musician plan from your FL Cloud account. Remember that your releases depend on FL Cloud staying active.
Start on Musician and skip the extras
Pick the Musician plan and leave every album extra unticked on your first release. You can add extras to a release later, so there's no reason to pay for them before you know you need them.