Welcome to Rent Free Media's documentation

Rent Free Media is a publishing distribution of Wagtail + Django aimed specifically at content creators who might otherwise use platforms such as Patreon, Substack, and Apple Podcasts. With it you can publish any sort of content to subscription users, as those services allow you to do.

As Rent Free Media is open source, you can do this on your own web host with your own user database and your own credit card (Stripe supported out of the box) merchant account. This is not a publishing "service" that extracts a fee for inserting itself between you and fans of your content. Quite the opposite actually, it aims to remove such middle men.

For those unfamiliar with the underlying frameworks, Wagtail is a CMS and website building platform that sits atop Django, a web framework originally written by newspaper publishers.

Please start at the "Installing" menu on the left and follow along with this tutorial in its entirety if you are unfamiliar with Wagtail and Django, you will have much more success with this software if you read the documentation in full. Publishing content isn't something one can just point and click their way through without understanding all of the particulars. You need to know not only what to click and input, but how the software works to get optimal results.

While it's certainly possible to publish content to your site via a phone or other mobile device once it's all set up, for the purposes of going through this manual the first time, you'll probably want two browser windows on a laptop or desktop side by side to make it easy to follow.

Enjoy!