00 / Paperweight FAQ
Straight answers about what Paperweight is, what it costs, and how your station stays yours.
01
Paperweight is a self-hosted broadcasting platform. It runs on your own computer and streams your media 24/7 as your own station — with your own public URL, your own subscriber list, and your own prices. There is no platform sitting between you and your audience.
02
The software is a free download with no license fee and no trial period, and Paperweight takes a 0% cut of tips, subscriptions, and vault unlocks. Payments go through your own Stripe or PayPal API keys, so their standard processing fees are the only fees involved. An optional paid Station Ops service exists for creators who want managed monitoring and backups.
03
On your machine. Your vault, your schedule, your subscriber and play data — all of it is stored locally on the hardware running your station. Nothing is uploaded to Paperweight Systems servers.
04
No. Your station runs entirely on your own hardware. A free Cloudflare Tunnel gives it a public stream URL, and the station keeps broadcasting whether or not any Paperweight Systems service is reachable. Listing your station in the public directory is optional and opt-in.
05
Share your station's public URL directly — it's yours, like a website. If you opt in to being searchable, your station also appears in the public directory on this site, where anyone can find and play it. You can also embed the mini player on your own pages.
Something else on your mind? Ask us directly.