I often get people email with questions such as, what’s the catch? Are your sound effects really free? Why do you spend your time doing this if you don’t make any money? So I thought it might be good to write a little blog post with some more information on us and why we do what we do.
Our sound effects are not aimed at anyone specific, although our recent poll showed the highest portion of our members use our sound effects for filmmaking. When we launched zapsplat.com, we did so as we realised there was a need for a sound effects library that allowed everyone access to high quality sound effects for free, but specifically those with little or no budget. However anyone and everyone is free to use our sound effects, from big Hollywood movie makers, through to students and teachers. That’s what we love about what we do, the diversity is very wide.
What’s the catch? There isn’t one…
In our world today, it seems almost always there is a catch. Often the lure of a freebie or cheap product ends in you needing to spend lots of money to continue using it or the quality just isn’t there. So with zapsplat.com there is no catch. You simply need to register a free account and then get downloading, while following our license agreement. We do allocate download points, but if you run out you simply top them up for free on our website. Or you can email us and we’ll give you more. The reason we have points is to stop bots or automated systems coming in and just grabbing all our sounds… that’s not good for our bandwidth or server performance.
Why do you spend your time doing this if you don’t make any money?
Actually we do, but not much. Zapsplat.com is funded by donations. We ask users to consider donating to help us keep our website running and free. But we don’t just take the donations and run… every penny is absorbed back into zapsplat to improve the service. From hardware upgrades and software development through to new equipment to record. Even sending out emails to our members costs us money, so donations are always needed. And, our members get lots of lovely bonuses if they donate as a donation automatically upgrades their account…. This gives: access to every sound as the original wav file; no 10 second delay between downloads; removal of the attribution requirement and no need to top up download points.
What’s the future of zapsplat.com?
We’ve loads of huge plans for zapsplat.com… firstly, we are about to launch free sound effect packs, so you can download sound effects in bulk. Some packs will bunch up sounds that exist in our library and others will bring new content, only available as a pack. This feature may even be live when you’re reading this as the launch is imminent.
We also have several new features and improvements being worked on. We want to add a sound’s duration to each result, add improved filtering and a better preview/play function. We also plan to bring more royalty free music to zapsplat in the near future and will be working hard to constantly add more free sound effects.
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