How payouts work.

Getting paid for your archive shouldn't mean giving it up—or signing fresh paperwork whenever a buyer calls. You keep ownership, fiund handles the AI licensing, and you're paid each time your material is licensed.

The model

• Per-licence payment. You're paid when your material is licensed to a buyer. Each licence is its own deal, with its own terms and its own payout.
• You keep ownership. Licensing is not selling. The archive stays yours — which is exactly what lets it earn more than once.
• fiund handles ordinary deals. Your contributor agreement gives us standing authority to negotiate and close AI licences without chasing you for another signature every time.
• You can withdraw. Ask to remove content from future marketing and licensing at any time. Existing licences continue under their written terms.

When money actually moves

Most of this industry is vague about timing, so here is our policy in plain terms:

• The trigger. A payout is owed when a buyer licenses a dataset that includes your material. Uploading content does not itself generate payment — anyone telling you otherwise is not describing licensing.
• The clock. We pay your share within 30 days of fiund receiving the buyer's payment. Elsewhere in this industry, four to five months from delivery to payout is openly described as normal. We think that's absurd, and we don't do it.
• The paperwork. Before your first payout we collect the tax form your situation requires (W-9 for US persons, W-8BEN otherwise) and your payout details — both handled in the contributor portal, with sensitive fields encrypted.
• The record. Every deal that includes your material appears in your portal under Delivery & Earnings: what was licensed, under which terms, and what you were paid.

Per-licence, in practice

A licence grants a defined buyer a defined use of defined material, for a defined term. Payment attaches to that grant. fiund can license the same active archive non-exclusively to another buyer under a new agreement, creating a new payout without sending the contributor another approval request. That's the practical difference between licensing and selling: a sale pays once, while a licensed archive stays an asset that can keep earning.

There are no figures on this page, deliberately. Rates are set per deal, against your actual material. Anyone quoting a headline rate before seeing an archive is guessing — or averaging over archives that aren't yours.

What moves the value of a licence

• Scarcity. Material that isn't already in the public crawl — unpublished, private, or consented at the source — is what buyers can't get elsewhere.
• Consent depth. Releases on file for the people in the recordings turn a diligence risk into a closing argument. Buyers pay for certainty.
• Buyer exclusivity and scope. Broader grants cost buyers more. A request to lock other buyers out requires a separate contributor addendum and additional payment.
• Metadata quality. Transcripts, speaker information, tagging, manifests — everything that saves a buyer work raises what your material is worth.
• Volume and technical quality. Hours matter, and originals beat lossy re-encodes. Masters are worth keeping intact.

Transparency you should expect

Every deal is documented: what was licensed, the buyer identity or category where confidentiality applies, the scope, and what you're owed. The buyer's licence records the same transaction from its side, which is part of why cleanly papered deals close.

You can review the complete Contributor Licensing Agreement before creating an account or uploading any content.

What to ask any licensor — including us

• Do I keep ownership, or is this a transfer dressed up as a licence?
• Does my contributor agreement authorize future deals, and what boundaries apply to that authority?
• Are AI-training rights explicit in the licence, or merely implied?
• What will I see about each deal — buyer identity or category, scope, terms, and payment?
• How long after the buyer pays do I get paid — and is that in writing?

If the answers are vague, walk. These questions are the supplier-side mirror of the diligence buyers run on us — a serious marketplace should pass both.