PaperweightThe 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.
What Paperweight is
Paperweight is a self-hosted broadcasting platform for creators. It 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. Every subscriber, token, and play is logged locally on your machine — there is no platform account, no algorithm, and no middleman.
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.
Core, Play, and Lab.
Paperweight Core
The engine. The self-hosted server that broadcasts your station, manages the vault and schedule, handles payments, and hosts the creator Studio dashboard.
Paperweight Play
The 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.
Paperweight Lab
Where new ideas ship first. Experimental features and tooling around the Paperweight ecosystem, graduating into Core as they prove out.
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.
Common questions.
What is Paperweight?
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.
Is Paperweight free?
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.
Where does my media live?
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.