Announcements9 min read
Honed Assets is live
A marketplace for fonts, UI kits, mockups, templates and every other kind of design work, built around one idea: the people who make the work should keep most of the money.
Today honedassets.com opens its doors. If you have landed here on day one, you are early: there are more empty shelves than full ones, and the first shops are still being set up. This post is the long version of what we are building, why it exists, and what you can expect from us in the coming weeks.
If you only want the short version: Honed Assets is a marketplace for digital design assets. Creators open a shop, upload their work, set their own prices and keep 70% of every sale. Buyers get one clear licence, instant download, and a subscription option for when they need a lot of assets at once. That is the whole product. Everything below is detail.
Why another marketplace
The design asset market is not short of places to sell. It is short of places that treat the seller like the reason the business exists rather than a cost to be managed.
Over the last few years the big marketplaces have moved in the same direction: lower creator shares, longer payout holds, exclusivity clauses tied to the better rate, and a subscription model where the person who made the asset earns cents on a download and cannot see how the number was calculated. Meanwhile, the do-it-yourself route (your own storefront, your own checkout, your own tax handling) gives you a better rate and none of the traffic.
We wanted the middle: a marketplace with real distribution, a fair and legible share, and no fine print that quietly moves the number. So we built one.
What Honed Assets is
Honed Assets is a curated marketplace for digital design assets, organised into twelve categories:
- Fonts
- Templates
- Graphics & Illustrations
- Brushes & Effects
- Mockups
- UI Kits
- Photos
- Icons
- 3D & Textures
- Presets
- Audio
- E-books
Every product is sold by a shop. A shop is a creator or a small studio with a name, a profile, a catalogue, and a set of tools for running a business: coupons, announcements, bundles, analytics, and a monthly payout. Buyers browse by category and tag, buy a licence outright, or subscribe to Honed Assets Pro and download from the products that are part of the subscription.
There is one design system, one checkout and one licence page. There are no listing fees and no monthly fees to keep a shop open. We only earn when a sale happens.
The money, in full
We would rather be boring and precise about this than clever, because the share is the reason the marketplace exists.
| What happens | Seller keeps | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| A one-off sale | 70% | Of the sale price, before payment processing |
| A sale in a product's first 45 days | 85% | Every new upload gets its own 45-day window |
| A sale through your own referral link | 85% | You brought the buyer, so there is no affiliate commission to pay |
| A Pro subscriber downloads your product | 70% of their share | Each subscriber's fee is split across the products they downloaded that month |
| A shop member downloads your product | 70% | Of the monthly membership fee you set |
Some of those rows deserve a second look.
The launch bonus is the one we are most pleased with. Every product you publish earns you 85% instead of 70% for its first 45 days. It is not a promotion for the marketplace's launch; it is permanent, and it resets for every new product. The point is to reward the thing that keeps a marketplace healthy, which is new work. A shop that publishes something every month is always earning at the higher rate on part of its catalogue.
The referral rate works the same way. Every seller has an affiliate link. If a buyer arrives through your link and buys your own product, you keep 85% of that line. If they buy something from another shop in the same order, you earn the standard 10% affiliate commission on it, and that commission comes out of our share, not the other seller's. Bring your own audience, and the marketplace charges you less for the privilege.
The subscription is where most marketplaces get vague, so here is exactly how ours works. Honed Assets Pro is $16 a month or $144 a year. Sellers choose per product whether it is included in Pro. At the end of each month, 70% of every subscriber's fee is shared out among the products that subscriber actually downloaded, split evenly. If a subscriber downloads four Pro products in a month, each of those four sellers gets a quarter of that subscriber's 70%. There is no opaque "pool", no points, and no weighting formula that changes without notice. Sellers see the breakdown, per month and per product, in their dashboard.
Payouts
Balances are paid on the 1st of every month by PayPal, Wise, UPI or bank transfer. A balance of $50 or more goes out on the 1st; anything smaller rolls into the following month rather than being eaten by transfer fees. There is no 30-day hold and no fee on our side of the transfer.
Sellers complete their tax details from the dashboard before the first payout, and every sale, refund, bonus and payout line is visible in the dashboard the moment it happens. The number you see is the number we pay from.
One licence buyers can actually read
Every product on Honed Assets is sold under a plain-English licence. For most categories that means three tiers the seller can price separately:
- Personal — personal projects and one client project. Not for products you sell.
- Commercial — unlimited client work and end products up to 5,000 sales.
- Extended Commercial — unlimited end product sales, unlimited team seats.
Fonts have their own tiers (Desktop, Webfont, App and ePub), because that is how type has always been licensed and buyers know what to expect. E-books are sold as a single-reader copy. The full text of each licence, with a comparison table, is at /licenses.
Sellers never give up ownership. You grant Honed Assets a non-exclusive licence to display and deliver your work, you can sell the same files anywhere else, and you can take a product down whenever you like.
What is in the shop toolkit
A marketplace is only as good as the tools it gives a seller to run a business. On day one a shop gets:
- A product form with per-tier pricing, a rich description editor, tags, versioning with release notes, an optional support window that buyers can extend, and SEO fields you control.
- Coupons with shareable links: /coupon/YOURCODE sets the code for 30 days and lands the buyer on your shop with a banner.
- Announcements posted to your shop page, with the option to email your buyers and followers up to twice a month.
- Bundles: several of your products at one price.
- Shop memberships: set a monthly price and members can download your whole catalogue. You keep 70%.
- Shop posts: two published articles a month on this blog, under "From the shops", with your product cards embedded.
- Demand data: what buyers searched for in the last 30 days, which searches returned nothing, and the open requests buyers have posted.
- Analytics for views, downloads, countries and search terms.
- Sale events: when we run a site-wide sale, you join or leave with one click.
- A team: invite collaborators with roles, so a studio can share one shop.
Quality over volume
Every new shop is reviewed by staff before its listings go live, usually within one working day, and every product goes through the same review. We check that the files are what the listing says, that third-party material inside them is actually redistributable, and that the preview matches the product. Roughly a third of first submissions come back with notes; resubmissions usually go through the same day.
Two things we want to be clear about:
Beyond review, our team tests products hands-on and publishes what we find as a "Tested by Honed Assets" note at the top of the product's reviews: what we opened it in, what worked, what did not, and a verdict. Buyers get an independent opinion that is not a star rating, and sellers get feedback that is specific enough to act on.
What day one looks like, honestly
Right now the catalogue is small. The first shops are being approved and the first products are going through review. Categories will fill unevenly for a while. If you are a buyer, the useful things to do today are to make an account, follow the shops you like as they appear, and post a request if you are looking for something specific: sellers see open requests in their demand dashboard, and a request is one of the strongest signals we can give them about what to make.
If you are a creator, this is the best moment there will ever be to open a shop. The catalogue is uncrowded, the launch bonus means your first 45 days on every product pay 85%, and the seller tools are already the complete set rather than a roadmap. Start at /sell; the onboarding takes about five minutes.
What is next
Over the next few weeks this blog will carry three kinds of posts: announcements like this one, guides for sellers and buyers, and stories from the shops themselves. We will also publish our numbers as they become meaningful rather than before.
We are a small team and we read everything. If something is broken, confusing or missing, tell us at hello@honedassets.com. If you have opened a shop, we would genuinely like to know what you are making and what would make selling easier.
Welcome to Honed Assets.
The people who make the work should keep most of the money. Everything else follows from that.
— The Honed Assets team
