Infrastructure for downloadable software
As easy as an app store.
Not a 30% landlord.
Spawn is the backend your paid app doesn’t have: checkout, licenses, downloads, and updates behind one SDK. Single-player games, desktop tools, plugins — if your app doesn’t need a server, you shouldn’t need one to sell it. You pay per license and install, never a cut of what you make.
Stripe + Clerk + a diffing algorithm + S3 + DRM, if they had a baby.
Rent needs enforcement.
A fair price sells itself.
Stores take 30% of every sale — even the ones you drove — and make you promise not to sell cheaper anywhere else. With Spawn you sell through your own merchant-of-record account, and Spawn meters what it does: licenses issued, installs kept current. Same price to your buyer. The difference lands in your pocket.
The whole pipeline,
none of the plumbing.
The five parts — identity, payments, storage, diffing, DRM — exist separately today. The product is the seam between them: one SDK where a purchase becomes an authenticated, entitled, updating, verified install. Nobody sells the thread. We do.
- Commerce
Your own Merchant of Record
Connect your Polar or Paddle account. They handle global tax, fraud, chargebacks, and payouts; Spawn never touches the money.
- Entitlements
A purchase flips a flag
Your app asks “does this user own the expansion?” — and you never see a payment, a card, or a refund.
- Delivery
Content-addressed CDN
Deduplicated, immutable chunks. Zero egress. The unchanged 40 GB never moves twice.
- Updates
Diffs, not downloads
Content-defined chunks, deduplicated across every version. A small change ships as a small update — no launcher, no re-download.
- Licensing
Offline, signed
ed25519 licenses the player’s machine verifies with no network, signed with your team’s own key. First launch is already authenticated.
- Runtime
Proton + Steam Deck
Upload the .exe. We manage the runtime, the prefixes, DXVK. It just runs — on Deck included.
Players never install “Spawn.”
- Buy
- Install
- Play
No launcher. No Spawn account. No store to resent. The runtime is a library that links into your build — so there’s nothing standing between “bought” and “playing”, and nothing for anyone to hate.
Push a build.
We do the hard part.
You upload only the chunks that changed. Spawn verifies, dedups, packages, and rolls out. Publishing feels like vercel deploy— because the heavy machinery is ours to run, not yours to build. Your app makes one init call, and you run no servers.
Built so you
can leave.
Buy-once software has to outlive whoever sold it. Export every license you’ve issued, plus the key that signs them, whenever you want. The runtime is Apache-2.0, and the server source turns Apache-2.0 after two years. If Spawn ever shuts down, you get both with notice, and your players keep playing.
You brought the audience.
Keep the margin.
For anyone selling paid software directly — single-player games, desktop tools, plugins. Buy once, install, play, no backend to build.