itch.io on your own domain.

itch.io was launched in March 2013 by Leaf Corcoran (working under the company name Tasty Pixel) with one stated goal: give creators a fair share of revenue and full control over how they sell. By default the platform sends roughly 90% of revenue to creators, and the remaining 10% platform cut is itself set by the creator. That last detail still surprises people. You can set the platform cut to 0%, and itch.io still ships your work. By comparison, Steam takes 30% (dropping to 25% past $10M and 20% past $50M). Apple's App Store takes up to 30%. Google Play takes 15 to 30%. Most asset stores take 30 to 50%. Patreon takes 5 to 12% plus payment processing. itch.io takes whatever you decide, and you can change that decision per project. The cultural consequence is huge: itch.io creators tend to ship weird, experimental, deeply personal work (art games, narrative zines, single-screen jam entries, queer dating sims, accessibility tools, Bitsy projects, niche dev plugins, tabletop RPG zines) that would not survive on bigger storefronts where curation is gatekept and minimum-price policies are enforced. A catalog widget that flattens itch.io into another marketplace grid misses the entire point of why creators chose to publish there in the first place. Poper renders PWYW chips honestly, surfaces devlogs as part of the work (not metadata), respects creator-set pricing including 0-floor downloads, and never injects ads or aggressive upsells into the embed. Your indie page stays your indie page.

Most generic price widgets treat itch.io PWYW projects as $0 or as a confusing $0+ range, both of which misrepresent what creators are actually doing on the platform. PWYW on itch.io comes with a suggested minimum (the creator's signal of what feels fair, displayed prominently in the itch.io UI), an optional minimum floor (the smallest amount anyone can pay, often 0 for indie work but sometimes higher for tools or commercial assets), and an optional charity-split percentage that routes a share of every sale to a named cause. The Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality on itch.io in June 2020 is the canonical proof of how powerful this model can be. Organized by Vambleer and a coalition of indie creators, the bundle ran from June 5 to June 15, 2020, asked for a $5 minimum payment, included 1,741 items from over 800 creators, and raised more than $8.1 million for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the Community Bail Fund. Almost 200,000 people paid into the bundle. That bundle showed PWYW is not a discount mechanism, it is a community contract: the creator says 'this is what feels fair, pay what you can,' and the buyer says 'I am paying you, and the cause, and the platform that lets this exist.' Poper renders PWYW with the suggested minimum, the floor, any charity split, and the 'name your price' chip so visitors understand the actual terms before they click through to itch.io.

itch.io is the de facto home of game jams on the open web. Ludum Dare migrated its official hosting to itch.io and now runs jam submissions and rankings on the platform every quarter. GMTK Game Jam, organized by Mark Brown of Game Maker's Toolkit, draws 5,000+ entries per year hosted on itch.io and consistently ranks as one of the largest game jams in the world. Global Game Jam runs many of its site-level submissions through itch.io. Brackeys Game Jam, Pirate Software's GameJam, the Strawberry Jam, the Pico-8 Jam, the Bitsy Jam, the Cozy Autumn Jam, and dozens of smaller themed jams all live on the platform. For a jam-active dev, the catalog is not just 'games I made' but 'jams I shipped' (theme constraint, ranking, time pressure, team size, scope). Most generic catalog widgets cannot tell the difference between a 48-hour Ludum Dare entry and a 2-year commercial release, which is exactly the difference jam devs want surfaced when they show their work to recruiters, publishers, or collaborators. Poper supports jam filtering by jam slug (for example ludum-dare-55, gmtk-2026, brackeys-12) or by year, surfaces the placement and the per-category rating (Innovation, Theme, Mood, Audio, Graphics, Game Feel, etc.) from itch.io's jam ranking system on each card, and lets you build a dedicated 'Jam Portfolio' page that shows only your jam entries. Recruiters can see your shipping cadence and your jam track record at a glance, which is a much stronger signal than a static resume bullet point.

itch.io is one of the only mainstream storefronts that treats non-game creative work as first-class catalog content. On the same creator page as your video games you can sell Godot plugins, Unity tools, Construct templates, GameMaker libraries, Bitsy templates, RPG Maker resources, pixel art packs, voxel asset packs, sound effect libraries, music loops, comics, narrative zines, tabletop RPG zines (the entire 'PbtA-adjacent zine' scene practically lives on itch.io), Lasers and Feelings hacks, board game prototypes, printable physical games (PDFs of card games, dice templates, paper prototypes), and even soundtracks ripped from your own jam entries. The catalog metadata exposes a project type field (Game, Tool, Asset, Comic, Zine, Soundtrack, Physical Game, Mod) and your widget should respect it instead of forcing every project into a single 'game card' template. Tools render with version, engine compatibility, and download size. Assets render with file format, license, and a usage example if provided. Comics and zines render with cover art and page count. Physical games render with print-and-play notes. Soundtracks render with track count and duration. Filtering by project type lets you build a 'Tools shelf' page targeted at gamedevs, a 'Zine catalog' page targeted at TTRPG players, or a 'Soundtracks' page targeted at composers, all off the same itch.io profile. That is exactly how indies on itch.io tend to organize their work in practice, and most third-party widgets do not support it at all.

An itch.io catalog is heavy on cover art by definition. Indie game cover art on itch.io is often 1024x768 or larger (the platform's recommended cover dimensions are 630x500 minimum but 'larger is better' for retina displays), animated cover GIFs are common, and a busy creator might have 30 to 80 cover images in their catalog. Loaded naively, that is several megabytes of imagery on a single page and a tanked Lighthouse score on a personal portfolio that probably also runs analytics, an embedded YouTube trailer, a Discord widget, and a press-kit modal. Indie devs are not big-budget DTC brands with a Cloudflare engineer on staff. The portfolio is usually a Carrd page, a Ghost blog, or a Webflow site, and a slow widget can sink the whole page. Poper's itch.io widget loads asynchronously below the fold by default, fetches catalog data from a global CDN edge cache (your visitors do not hit itch.io on every page view, which is also kinder to itch.io's servers), lazy-loads cover art with proper width and height attributes to prevent layout shift, uses scoped CSS that will not collide with your portfolio CSS, ships zero blocking JS in the critical render path, respects prefers-reduced-motion for animated covers, and clocks in under 40KB gzipped. For a portfolio site that gets indexed by Google and shared in Discord servers and on Cohost, that performance gap is the difference between ranking on page 1 and ranking on page 4 for your own dev name. It is also the difference between visitors browsing your full catalog and visitors bouncing because the page froze on a 6-year-old laptop. Indie audiences play on whatever hardware they have, and your portfolio should respect that. The widget also defers cover-art animation until the card scrolls into view, which keeps battery and CPU usage low on phones and Chromebooks where a lot of indie game discovery actually happens in 2026.