Questions, answered straight.

It’s a download gate for independent artists and DJs: you give away a track, and in return fans land on an email list and a real CRM that you own — not a list the platform rations back to you.

Make an account, upload your track and reward, stack the steps you want, and ship the link. Email capture works on day one — you only add platform steps if and when you want them. Here’s the whole flow.

No. A gate with just an email step is a complete gate. SoundCloud, Spotify, Discord and the rest are optional modules you toggle on — none of them is the foundation, so your gate works fully with all of them off.

Minutes. Add the track and reward, pick your steps, set the combination rule, and preview the fan flow live on a phone before you post it anywhere.

A step is one thing a fan does to unlock — confirm an email, follow on Spotify, join a Discord, and so on. Each step is a self-contained module, and you stack as many or as few as you like.

Yes — a combination rule decides what clears the gate. Require all of them, any one of them, or a custom mix. The email step is always part of the floor, so you never trade away the owned relationship.

Because email is the part no platform can switch off. It’s the asset that travels with you, so GateCrate keeps it as the floor of every gate while the platform steps stay optional on top.

Once they clear the steps, the reward is served through a short-lived signed link generated server-side. The storage key never reaches the page, so a copied URL goes nowhere after it expires. More on how downloads are kept safe.

Yes — the builder shows the exact mobile unlock flow live as you edit, so you see what a fan sees before the link is public.

Every fan who unlocks, with their email, when they opted in, and which gate they came through. You can tag them by release, city, or how hard they dig, and build segments from there.

No. Fans dedupe by email, so one person is one fan no matter how many of your gates they clear. Their tags and consent stay attached to that single record.

Any time. Your fans export as a plain CSV you can take to your newsletter, your label, or your next platform — here’s exactly what a CSV export looks like. The list is yours to walk out with.

Double opt-in, no pre-checked boxes — a fan confirms before they’re ever on your list, and every change is recorded so you can show exactly when each fan said yes.

Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube, and Discord, alongside the email step. Each is one entry in the same registry — SoundCloud has no special status, so the gate works fully with any of them turned off.

A hard step is confirmed by the platform’s API or a webhook — we know it happened. A soft step is a best-effort click-through that a platform won’t let us read back. GateCrate labels each plainly and never dresses a soft attestation up as a verified action.

No. When a fan connects a platform to clear a step, that connection is isolated from your login — their tokens never touch your session, and yours never touch theirs.

Your email capture keeps working, because it never depended on that platform in the first place. A platform step might need re-wiring, but the owned list — the part that matters — is untouched.

On an open score built from real unlocks across each genre — UK garage, DnB, dubstep, future garage, amapiano and more. It’s a reflection of what fans are actually digging, not who paid the most. See the charts.

No. Chart rank is the open score and is kept separate from anything paid, so the charts stay honest about what’s moving in the scene.

Ship a gate, pick the genre, and let fans unlock it. As real unlocks come in, your track earns its place on that genre’s chart — no extra step needed.

You do. Your fans’ email is never shared or sold, and it exports as a CSV whenever you ask. GateCrate holds it so you can use it — not so we can ration it back to you. Why that’s the whole point.

Fan data lives in Postgres with platform tokens under envelope encryption — never plaintext, never handed to the browser. Every webhook and OAuth callback is signature-checked and schema-validated before it touches your data. The full rundown.

You can honour that. The default erasure path anonymises a fan in place — their personal details are redacted while your aggregate counts stay intact — and a full hard delete is available when a fan asks for true erasure.