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Drum hits, one-shots, a few loops. Open in any DAW.Royalty-free perpetual ownership versus credit-expire subscription models. Concrete numbers on Splice and Loopcloud public pricing, our 14-day refund window, and what 'for life' means when the platform itself changes.
"A kit you bought in 2026 should open in a project you start in 2034." — SONICHAOS editorial, on the design of the licence
The kit licence on SONICHAOS is short on purpose: royalty-free, perpetual, worldwide, all-platform, on download. You buy the kit once. The WAVs stay yours. Cancel the optional Plus plan tomorrow; every loop you downloaded yesterday stays in your project files. This post explains why we built the licence this way, what the comparison looks like against Splice and Loopcloud public pricing, and where our 14-day refund window kicks in.
Splice and Loopcloud both run on a credit subscription. Splice charges $9.99 a month for the entry plan; Loopcloud charges $7.99 a month at the equivalent tier. The monthly allotment buys a fixed number of samples; the samples themselves are royalty-free in the sense that you can release commercial work using them. The catch sits at the edge of the model: the credits expire if you pause the subscription, and the platform's ongoing access to the catalog is gated by the sub.
You keep the WAVs you downloaded; you lose the ability to download more without re-subscribing. For a working creator on a steady release cadence, the model is fine. For a creator who works in bursts, the credits accrue and expire on a schedule that does not match the work.
The SONICHAOS model is the inverse. The kit is the unit, not the sample. You buy the kit once at $19 to $119. Every loop, one-shot, MIDI file, preset, and stem in the folder is yours from that moment forward. The next kit you want is a separate buy. There is no calendar pressure on the catalogue.
The honest version of "for life" is: as long as you have the WAV on disk and a DAW that opens 24-bit 44.1 kHz WAV, the kit works. The licence travels with the WAV, not with the SONICHAOS servers.
That matters because every platform changes. Splice was sold to Influence Media in 2022 and the public pricing has changed twice since. Loopcloud has been part of the Loopmasters group since 2017 and the credit-allocation rules have shifted at least three times. Ghosthack pivoted from a buy-once-only model to a Soundpack Club hybrid in 2023.
The SONICHAOS servers might change too. The catalogue might grow, shrink, re-price, re-section. The licence on the kit you downloaded in 2026 does not. The receipt PDF that lives in the kit folder is ed25519-signed; the signature covers the kit slug, the buyer, the download time, and the licence terms in force at that moment. If we re-write the licence in 2028, your 2026 download still rides on the 2026 terms. The signature is the audit trail.
Every first-time kit buyer gets 14 days from the download timestamp to ask for a refund. The window is wide on purpose. A first-time buyer might pull a trap kit and discover the BPM grid does not match their project; the right answer is to refund the kit and let them buy the right kit, not to lock them into the wrong one.
Three rules govern the window:
The window is shorter than statutory rights in some jurisdictions and longer than them in others; we honour the longer of the two automatically.
A licence that hands the buyer perpetual ownership has to pay the producer fairly on the buy, not on a per-stream basis. The split is 60/40 on every download: 60% to the producer who made the kit, 40% to SONICHAOS. The split is not tiered; a producer who hits $100k a year in kit sales takes the same 60% as a producer who sells two kits. Stripe Connect handles the payouts; the money arrives on the 7th of every month.
A producer who signed in February 2026 has already shipped four kits, taken 60% of every download since, and not had to chase any royalty payments. The licence is short for the buyer because the payout math is straightforward for the producer. The two ends meet in the middle.
The buyer gets the WAV forever. The producer gets paid on the 7th. The platform does not get to renegotiate either side in 2028.
