DIRECTCUT
FOR FILMMAKERS

Your film. Worldwide distribution. Fair fees.

You pay for storage at cost, then keep 80% of every rental. DirectCut's 20% pays for overhead and building the platform.

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YOU EARN
$2.39
ON A $2.99 RENTAL · 90-MIN FILM · YOU KEEP 80%
How It Works
01

Upload your assets

Drop in your film, trailer link, and description, plus a hero image — required before you can submit. We handle the transcoding.

02

Set your price

Name your own price. Rental prices start at $1.99.

03

We review it

Uploads are enabled per account, and every film is reviewed by DirectCut before it goes live — usually within a few days. You pay nothing until it is approved.

04

Get paid, directly

80% of every rental, paid out to you directly by Stripe. Streaming and card fees are the buyer’s, never deducted from your share.

Transparent pricing

Two charges. Both transparent.

Rentals · what you earn
80%of every rental is yours

We split every rental 80/20 — nothing else is deducted from your share. Streaming and payment processing are itemized on the buyer's checkout at posted rates, so 80% can be nice and clean. Our goal is to shrink that 20% over time as DirectCut grows, though doing that without ads or a large pile of venture capital is hard. We think it's possible anyway.

Hosting · what you pay
At costno markup
  • Storage: $5 per 1,000 minutes of video per month, charged annually. A 90-minute film is $5.87 for the year — $5.40 of storage plus card processing. $1.00 minimum per film, so a short still costs us something to host.
  • Streaming: paid by the viewer at checkout at our rate of $2 per 1,000 minutes — never billed to you.

When your film is approved and published, you pay 12 months of storage up front — your only hosting cost. Declined submissions are never charged. Add a card before you submit your first film.

Content protection

How your film is protected

  • Private by default. Your film never sits at a public URL. Playback works only through signed links we mint for a viewer after they pay.
  • Access that expires. Every playback link expires within hours and never outlives the rental. When a rental ends, playback stops — on the web and in our apps.
  • No downloads. Viewers stream; they never get a file. Download access is disabled for every film.
  • Locked to DirectCut. Playback is domain-locked to directcut.co, so a signed link can't be embedded on another site.

This is the same signed-stream protection model used by the major independent distribution platforms. One honest limit: no streaming service can prevent screen recording — signed streams protect the file itself and who can play it. If your film demands DRM protection, let's talk. We'll absolutely consider adding as scale permits.

Your film. Your price.
Your audience.

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