How the map trade actually works here.

Applying to sell

Every vendor account starts as an application, reviewed by hand — this isn’t a self-serve signup.

Listing one map

The editor is one screen: your files on one side, the details that describe them on the other.

• Map file — the image being sold, plus an optional Foundry sidecar for the same version (see Foundry Files).
• Versions — add more if you’re selling day/night variants, a flooded state, or similar depictions of one map. Each gets its own files.
• Gallery — up to five extra marketing images, shown alongside the map itself on the listing page.
• Title, price, description, grid — grid size is asked once per map, not once per version, and only when the map actually has a grid.
• Classification — biome, structure, setting, era, season, lighting, art style, and tags, plus the AI-art disclosure checkbox if it applies.

When you’re ready, you have two ways to go live, and both are real sales:

You can move a public listing to private and back at no cost — the credit is already held either way. Details on what “held” means are in Credits & fees.

Listing many at once

If you’re bringing over an existing catalogue, drop a whole folder of files onto the bulk import page instead of creating listings one at a time.

• Each map file becomes its own draft, titled from its filename.
• A sidecar file is paired to its map automatically by matching filename — hall.webp pairs with hall.dd2vtt. An unpaired sidecar is reported and skipped rather than turned into a listing with no map.
• You can set a price, grid size, and classification for the whole batch up front, or leave everything blank and fill it in per-listing afterward.
• Import only creates drafts. Nothing from a bulk import goes live automatically — you review and publish each map individually, the same as any other listing.
• If an upload fails partway through, retrying resumes into the draft it already started rather than creating a duplicate.

Listing credits

A listing credit is what pays for the right to have one map for sale at a time — public or private, both count.

Republishing something that’s already live, or switching a listing between public and private, costs nothing further — both states hold exactly one credit either way.

If a refund or an admin correction ever pulls your credits below the number of listings you have live, nothing already published or shared is taken down. You’re simply unable to publish anything new until you’re back within your balance.

Fees and getting paid

Every sale has two deductions from your listed price:

Price in packs, not singles. The processing fee is mostly a flat cost per item sold, so it takes a smaller bite out of one larger sale than the same total split across several small ones. A $1 single keeps you 42% of the sale; a $10+ bundle keeps 80%+. If you’re selling a set of 5–10 related maps, one $8–15 bundle beats ten $1 listings.

Your fee and commission are calculated the same way no matter what else is in a buyer’s cart — a sale sitting beside other vendors’ items never changes your payout. Your numbers are always exactly what the table above says for your price.

Your own files

You can fetch a copy of anything you’ve uploaded — including a draft that’s never been published — straight from the editor, at any time. That’s not a purchase and isn’t logged as one; it’s the same authority that lets you edit, reprice, or delete the listing in the first place.

Deleting and retiring

What happens when you remove something depends on one question: has it ever sold?

This applies even to a single copy sold to one buyer years ago — once something has an owner, removing it from sale is the only option. Deleting it outright is not.

Ownership is permanent, and there are no refunds

Once you buy a map, it’s yours. Nothing a vendor does afterward — unpublishing, repricing, running a sale, retiring a version, archiving the whole listing, even leaving the platform — ever touches something you already own. You keep the exact files you paid for.

Ownership can only be reversed by an admin, and only for fraud, a copyright takedown, or platform abuse — never at a vendor’s request and never automatically because a listing changed.

Chargebacks and disputes

A cardholder dispute filed with your bank (a “chargeback”) is different from a refund we issue — it isn’t something we can decline on your behalf once your bank has processed it. A successful dispute automatically reverses the entitlement it paid for, because the funds are already gone either way.

For vendors, this is real cost: every dispute — win or lose — carries a flat, non-refundable fee, on top of losing the sale itself. Accurate listings and working files are the best protection against one being filed at all.

Content standards and AI disclosure

If part of a map’s art was produced with generative AI, that’s disclosed on the listing as its own flag — separate from art style, because style is what a map looks like and this is how it was made. A painterly map with an AI-generated base is both, and the disclosure can’t be swapped out for a style tag instead. Buyers can see this on every listing before they buy, and it can be filtered on in browse for anyone who cares either way.

Vendors are expected to list only work they have the right to sell. Copyright complaints are handled by an admin and can result in a listing being taken down or, in serious or repeated cases, a vendor account being closed.

Accounts and privacy

• Email verification. Signing up with a password requires clicking a verification link before you can sign in. Signing up with Google skips this step — Google has already verified the address.
• Linking accounts. If you sign up with a password and later sign in with Google using the same address, the two are only linked together once both are verified — this stops someone else from hijacking your email by registering it first.
• Cart before sign-in. Adding maps to your cart before creating an account is safe — it carries over the moment you sign in or sign up, rather than starting you over.
• Downloads are logged. Every time a download link is issued to a buyer, that’s recorded — it’s what protects vendors against piracy and gives them real sales data. A vendor fetching their own uploaded file is not logged this way; see Your own files.
• Sales tax. Where it applies, tax is calculated and added automatically at checkout based on the purchase — you never need to work it out yourself.

Making one, as a vendor

You don’t need Foundry itself to produce a sidecar — you need a map-making tool with a Universal VTT exporter. The most common:

• Dungeondraft — a purpose-built battlemap editor with a native “Export Universal VTT” option that writes walls and lights from what you drew directly to a .dd2vtt file.
• DungeonFog and Arkenforge— both offer their own Universal VTT export for maps built in their editors.
• Hand-authoring the JSON format directly is possible but rarely worth it — it’s meant to be a machine-readable export, not something typed by hand.

Upload the map image and its sidecar together on the same version in the editor — they’re paired automatically by which version you attach them to, and bulk import pairs them by matching filename. A version with only a sidecar and no map image isn’t a valid listing; there has to be something to look at.

Using one, as a buyer

Foundry VTT has a built-in importer for Universal VTT files: from the Scenes tab, choose Import and point it at the .dd2vtt/.uvtt/.df2vtt file you downloaded. It creates the scene, places the walls, and drops in the lights automatically — no manual tracing.

If a map you bought has no sidecar, it’s still fully usable in Foundry — drop the image straight in as a scene background the same as any other picture. The sidecar only matters if you want the walls and lights placed for you instead of by hand.