Short answer: soona has acquired Trend.io, and the two now operate as one company selling creator UGC through two separate front doors at two different prices. Trend.io still runs, still sells the same credit packages of $550, $1,045, $1,980, and $3,872, and those credits still expire 12 months after purchase. soona sells UGC video directly at $89 to $259 per video with no annual commitment. If you hold unspent Trend credits, that expiry date is the thing to act on. Nothing about your existing content license changes: footage you already approved stays licensed to you.
This is the biggest consolidation the UGC production market has had, and almost nobody has written it up with the actual numbers. Every figure below was checked on soona.co and trend.io in August 2026.
Did soona acquire Trend.io?
Yes. soona says so directly on its own UGC page, describing its current product as "built from our learnings from acquiring Trend.io" and stating that user-generated content at soona is powered by Trend. The confirmation that convinced us it is fully integrated rather than a loose partnership is smaller and harder to fake: the support address published on Trend.io's own pricing page is now [email protected].
What makes the deal interesting is that the two companies were not doing the same thing. soona built physical studios and sold product photography and video at a per-asset price, with photographers, lighting, and bookable models. Trend.io was a curated marketplace of creators filming at home. Buying Trend gave soona the half of the market it could not serve from a studio, and it is now the only company in the category selling both.
Is Trend.io shutting down?
No, and there is no sign it is about to. The site is live, the pricing page is current, the credit packages are unchanged, and it is still taking new briefs. Acquirers usually keep a working funnel running, and Trend.io ranks for terms soona does not, so folding it in quickly would cost soona traffic it just paid for.
The realistic risk is not a shutdown but a slow merge: pricing pages get harmonized, one brand becomes the default, and the acquired product's edges get sanded off. That process usually takes a year or two and it rarely comes with much notice, which is why the credit question below is worth ten minutes of your time now rather than next quarter.
The same company, two prices for the same thing
This is the part that matters commercially. Buy UGC video from soona directly and you pay a per-video rate set by creator tier. Buy it from Trend.io and you prepay for a credit package that gets cheaper per video the more you buy. Same parent company, materially different economics.
| Route | What you pay up front | Effective cost per video | Expiry | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| soona UGC, direct | Nothing. No annual commitment | $89 to $259, set by creator level | None | Low or unpredictable volume, or when you want a specific creator tier |
| Trend Starter | $550 for 60 credits | $91.67 | 12 months | Up to 6 videos or 15 photos on one channel |
| Trend Essential | $1,045 for 140 credits | $74.64 | 12 months | Up to 14 videos or 35 photos |
| Trend Growth | $1,980 for 280 credits | $70.71 | 12 months | Up to 28 videos or 70 photos |
| Trend Scale | $3,872 for 560 credits | $69.14 | 12 months | Up to 56 videos or 140 photos |
| soona studio video clip | $149 booking fee, or a membership | $93 per clip, plus $99 pro edit if wanted | None | Controlled studio footage, not creator UGC |
Read the two ends of that table together. The cheapest creator video from this company is about $69 through a Trend Scale package. The most expensive is $259 through a top-tier soona creator. That is a 3.7x spread inside one business, and which one you land on depends entirely on which website you happened to arrive at.
What happens to my Trend credits?
They keep working, and they keep expiring. Trend's pricing page still carries the note that credits expire 12 months after purchase, and an acquisition does not reset that clock. If you bought a Growth or Scale package and are sitting on a balance, the expiry date on that purchase is the only deadline in this whole story that costs you real money.
Run the arithmetic honestly, because prepaid volume discounts only exist if you spend them. A $3,872 Scale package is about $69 per video if you use all 56. Use 20 of them and let the rest lapse and you actually paid about $194 per video, which is worse than the Starter package you skipped and worse than buying soona direct at $89. The headline rate on a credit pack is a forecast, not a price.
Two practical moves. First, log in and find your actual balance and purchase date rather than estimating, because most teams are further behind than they think. Second, if the balance is large and your content calendar is thin, brief the volume now even if the campaigns are not ready, since finished footage sitting in your asset library is worth more than credits that vanish.
Does my content license change?
No. Content you already commissioned and approved was licensed to you at the moment of approval, and a change of ownership at the vendor does not claw that back. Trend granted full licensing on approved content and soona states an unlimited worldwide license for all platforms and purposes on the UGC you approve.
What is worth doing anyway, and this applies to every vendor rather than this one, is getting your licensing paperwork out of the platform and into your own records. If a portal is retired or merged and you later need to prove you had the right to run a piece of footage as an ad, a screenshot of a dashboard that no longer exists is a weak position. Download the license terms attached to each order and keep them where your legal and finance people can find them. Our guide to UGC usage rights and licensing covers the seven clauses that actually decide what you can do with a video.
Should I switch UGC platforms because of this?
Not by itself. An acquisition is a reason to look, not a reason to leave. If your Trend campaigns are producing footage that performs, the creators did not change on the day the deal closed and neither did the output.
The situations where it genuinely does justify a move are narrower. You should look around if you were buying Trend specifically because it was independent and focused, and a six-product platform is not what you signed up for. You should look around if your renewal is coming and the rate has moved. And you should look around if you need more creator variety than the merged roster offers, since soona describes its network as hundreds of creators and accepts roughly 35% of applicants, which is a real quality signal but a real ceiling on how many visibly different faces you can put in one test.
If you are evaluating, our soona alternative comparison lays out where the studio model beats a marketplace and where it does not, and the Trend.io alternative page has the credit-package math in full. Neither pretends soona is bad at what it is good at, because it is not.
Five things to check when a content vendor gets acquired
This will happen again. The UGC production market has too many companies selling a similar service for consolidation to stop here, so it is worth having a standard response rather than improvising each time.
- Prepaid balances and their expiry dates. Credits, retainers, and unused package volume are the only part of the relationship with a hard deadline. Find the number and the date on the same day you hear the news.
- License scope on everything you already own. Export it. Do not rely on a portal continuing to exist. Check specifically whether the license is perpetual or term-limited, because a term-limited license quietly becomes a problem when the vendor that would have renewed it is gone.
- Your rate at renewal, in writing. Acquired products get repriced toward the acquirer's model. Ask directly whether your current rate holds through the next term.
- Whether your creators came along. If two or three specific creators produce most of your winning ads, confirm they are still active on the merged platform before you plan a quarter around them.
- What the combined spend now looks like. Consolidation often means one invoice replaces two, or two replace one. When you take a vendor recommendation to whoever controls the budget, it lands better as a costed comparison than as a conversation, and you can turn the comparison into a deck in the time it would take to write the email.
What this changes about buying UGC in 2026
The strategic read is that the category is splitting into two kinds of company. One kind is building a broad creative platform where UGC is a module alongside studio production, asset management, listing analytics, and AI tooling. soona is now firmly in that group, and for a brand that wants a single vendor it is a strong option.
The other kind does UGC production and nothing else: match a brand to vetted real creators, get the brief filmed, attach a paid-ad license, repeat. That is what UGCMarketplace is, and the case for it is not that platforms are bad but that ad creative is a volume game. You are not trying to make one perfect video, you are trying to find the one in eight that the algorithm rewards, which means you need many different real people filming many different angles at a price that makes losing seven of them fine. Our plans start at $99 with nothing to prepay and nothing that expires.
If you are rebuilding your shortlist off the back of this, the honest starting point is what everyone charges. We keep a first-party UGC platform pricing comparison with every published rate in the category, rechecked against each vendor's own site rather than repeated from other blogs, and a roundup of the best UGC platforms that now includes the merged soona and Trend picture.
All pricing and company statements in this article were verified first-party on soona.co and trend.io in August 2026. Vendors change prices without notice, so check before you commit budget.
See how UGCMarketplace works for your kind of brand on the use cases page.
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