In development · Not yet open to the public
Own it. Not a licence to stream it.
Freehold Market is a marketplace for digital works you can actually keep — downloaded, checksummed, portable, and paid for directly to the people who made them.
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DRM-free by default
No activation, no proprietary player, no phone-home. Download the file and it is a file.
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Durable records
Every acquisition issues a serial, a receipt, and a SHA-256 you can verify yourself.
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Creators paid directly
Fixed price, pay-what-you-want, or free with optional support. Never a closed ecosystem.
Owning digital media legally should be easier than pirating it.
The internet made digital distribution easy. It did not make digital ownership simple. Someone who wants to legally buy and keep a song, a book, a film, or a piece of software has to work out where it's sold, whether it can be downloaded, whether it's DRM-free, whether they're buying a copy or renting access, and whether any of it survives the platform changing its mind.
- Fragmented across dozens of storefronts
- Restricted by DRM and device activation
- Unclear about what you actually bought
- Locked to a platform that can change policy
- One place to search
- Downloadable, in real formats
- Portable between their own devices
- Theirs once it's on disk
Most people aren't refusing to pay. They're refusing a worse product. We're not moralising about that gap — we're closing it, and paying creators on the way through.
Anything you can download, keep, and back up.
Freehold Market is built for digital works that can be legally owned, archived, and used outside a proprietary platform — free, paid, pay-what-you-want, open source, public domain, or creator-supported.
- Music
- Ebooks
- Audiobooks
- Films & video
- Games
- Software
- Open-source applications
- Zines
- Courses
- Sample packs
- Templates
- Digital art
- Public-domain editions
- Creator-made media
Every listing states plainly whether it's downloadable, whether it's DRM-free, what formats are included, and what the licence lets you do — before you pay, not after.
What this is, and what it isn't.
Being clear about the second list matters as much as the first. A marketplace that promises ownership and then quietly becomes a streaming catalogue has broken the only promise it made.
- A DRM-free digital marketplace
- A creator-support platform
- A legal media discovery index
- A downloadable media library
- A provenance-aware ownership ledger
- An integration-friendly catalogue for external tools
- A streaming service
- A DRM system
- A piracy tool, or a way around DRM
- A subscription silo
- A replacement for Jellyfin, Plex, Navidrome or Calibre
- A blockchain or NFT ownership scheme
Files you keep, and a record that proves it.
- You get the file Download it, back it up, store it locally, and use it in your own media library. No activation step, no proprietary player, and nothing that phones home to check you're still allowed.
- You get a record Each purchase or claim creates an entitlement record, a receipt, a file checksum, and a licence reference — so what you bought, and on what terms, is answerable later without trusting anyone's memory.
- You keep both if we disappear Files on your disk don't depend on us staying in business. That's the point of selling copies instead of access, and it's the test every design decision here has to pass.
- Protection without hostility Serials, checksums and provenance records exist to protect creators from unauthorised redistribution — not to punish normal ownership. Backing up your own files is normal ownership.
Not open yet.
Freehold Market is in active development and isn't accepting buyers or creators today. There's no signup to join and no date to announce — when the doors open, this page will say so. If you make things you'd want to sell this way, or you're just interested, we'd like to hear from you in the meantime.