The streaming platform you own.

Paperweight turns a computer you already have into a 24/7 broadcast station — your media, your audience, your money, and a 0% platform cut.

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01 / Definition

What Paperweight is

Paperweight started as a personal project, reviving my old internet radio station. As I rebuilt it, I kept adding features pulled from my own experience as an audio engineer and media production company founder, plus conversations with musicians about what they actually needed. The project outgrew the original idea fast: I realized I could make a real mark on the media world if I stopped gatekeeping the sauce. What it grew into is a self-hosted broadcasting platform that streams your vault over HLS around the clock, gives listeners a public player at your own URL, and handles subscriptions, tips, and vault unlocks through payment keys you hold. There is no platform account, no algorithm, and no middleman.

02 / How it works

Three steps to your first broadcast.

Download and run

Install on Windows, macOS, Linux, or a Raspberry Pi. The setup wizard gets a station running in minutes.

Load your vault

Drop media into your vault. Paperweight scans it, schedules it, and broadcasts 24/7 — with dayparting, smart playlists, and a live browser mic when you want to go live yourself.

Go public

A free Cloudflare Tunnel gives your station a public URL. Set your prices, issue access tokens, and get paid through your own Stripe or PayPal keys.

03 / The ecosystem

Core, Play, and Lab.

001Paperweight CoreComponent / PaperweightThe engine. The self-hosted server that broadcasts your station, manages the vault and schedule, handles payments, and hosts the creator Studio dashboard.

002Paperweight PlayComponent / PaperweightThe listening side. The public player every station serves to its audience — live signal, library access, and supporter checkout, all on the creator's own URL.

003Paperweight LabComponent / PaperweightWhere new ideas ship first. Experimental features and tooling around the Paperweight ecosystem, graduating into Core as they prove out.

04 / Infrastructure

Platform cut: 0%
Data: Local
Payments: Your keys
Runtime: Your hardware

Infrastructure, not a platform.

Paperweight is closer to owning a transmitter than joining a network. Your station keeps broadcasting whether or not any Paperweight Systems service is reachable; your subscriber list is a file on your disk, not a row in our database. If we disappeared tomorrow, every station would keep running.

05 / FAQ

Common questions.

All questions →

01What is Paperweight?Answer / PreviewVIEW →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.02Is Paperweight free?Answer / PreviewVIEW →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.03Where does my media live?Answer / PreviewVIEW →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.