Hi, my lovelies. It’s Filipa, the one waving her arms like a loon at the back of every room.

I’ve been in Second Life since 2005. I’ve sold, built, roleplayed, run sims, published magazines, and had my heart broken by the occasional thief, just like a lot of you. I’ve also had a little store on Kitely for years, and I’ve watched you, my creator friends, shake your heads every time I mention it. “OpenSim? Oh honey, no. They’ll steal everything.”

I get it. I really do. So I sat down with Kitely’s CEO and its long-time residents, asked every pointy, paranoid question I could think of, and wrote down the answers. This is me, sharing them with you, straight. No sales fluff, and I’ll tell you the parts that aren’t perfect too, because you deserve that.

Grab a coffee. Let’s talk.

Why should you care about Kitely at all?

Because the virtual world is bigger than one grid, and right now a whole lot of people out there are shopping with nobody to buy from.

Kitely is an OpenSim grid, which means it runs on the open-source cousin of the SL platform. Same kind of avatars, same building tools, and you can log in with Firestorm OS, the OpenSim edition of the viewer most of you already use. (Grab it free at firestormviewer.org, on the Downloads page. It’s a separate download from the version you use for SL, which won’t connect to Kitely.) If you can make it in SL, you can sell it on Kitely.

Here’s what makes Kitely different from the rest of the OpenSim world, which I’ll admit can be a bit of a wild west:

The Marketplace is the reason I came. Kitely has a full web Marketplace, just like the SL Marketplace you already sell on (officially it’s called Kitely Market). When I chose Kitely, nothing else in OpenSim came close, and as far as I know that’s still true.

And timing matters. OSgrid, the oldest and one of the biggest OpenSim grids, goes dark at midnight on December 31, 2026. An attacker got in through its insecure home-hosted region connections and flooded its servers with junk data. It plans to reopen in 2027 with a clean slate: accounts survive, but inventories are wiped (Hypergrid Business). That’s 4,000+ active people who will need clothes, hair, homes, furniture, and everything else, all over again.

• It’s run like a business, not a hobby. Kitely has been operating since 2011, and its Marketplace has been open since 2013.
• It was built with creators in mind. It has a permission SL doesn’t have, which gives you more say over where your products go. More on that below, because it’s the big one.
• The CEO actually talks to you. Every Sunday there’s an open community meeting where you can ask Ilan Tochner, the CEO, anything. I did. Repeatedly. He didn’t run.
• The community is kind. One long-timer described it as “like Cheers,” and honestly, that’s it. Friendly faces, every week.

And timing matters. OSgrid, the oldest and one of the biggest OpenSim grids, goes dark at midnight on December 31, 2026. An attacker got in through its insecure home-hosted region connections and flooded its servers with junk data. It plans to reopen in 2027 with a clean slate: accounts survive, but inventories are wiped (Hypergrid Business). That’s 4,000+ active people who will need clothes, hair, homes, furniture, and everything else, all over again.

Every great product you bring makes Kitely a better place to land, and every new resident is another customer for you.

Why add Kitely to your sales profile?

Think of it the way a real-world shop thinks about opening a second location: same products, new customers, little extra work.

• You’ve already made the stuff. If you hold the source files for your mesh, textures and scripts, you can upload them to Kitely and list them. No redesign needed.
• Less competition, more spotlight. In SL you’re one of thousands in every category. On Kitely you can be the name for hair, or boots, or castles, or HUDs. Getting in early is how reputations are made.
• Hungry buyers. OpenSim residents have been begging for quality content for years. Add the OSgrid folks rebuilding from scratch, and you’ve got demand looking for supply.
• Don’t keep every egg in one basket. Your whole livelihood living on one company’s servers, under one company’s rules, is a risk too. A second storefront is insurance.
• A Marketplace that runs itself. The Kitely Marketplace handles every sale and delivery for you, and redelivers lost purchases automatically, even years later. Fewer “I lost my boots” IMs. You’re welcome. And you choose how you get paid: in Kitely Credits (KC, Kitely’s version of Lindens) or in US dollars, straight through the Marketplace.

You don’t even need Export to win. OpenSim is full of people walking around in bare-bones avatars, hungry for good stuff. Fill the Kitely Marketplace with gorgeous No-Export products, and they’ll come to Kitely to shop and stay to wear it. Your products stay locked on Kitely, you still get the sales, and the grid grows. Honestly, I think that’s the most powerful move of all.

What it costs you

The money part, plain and simple. Kitely takes a commission on each sale.

A few details for the USD side:

• Each sale is held for 45 days before it clears, to get past PayPal’s dispute window.
• Payouts start once your cleared balance reaches $10.
• You need a Verified PayPal account. PayPal’s own fees still apply.
• Buyers pay a $0.30 processing fee on any cart with USD items; KC-only carts don’t.

How that stacks up against SL. In SL, getting real money out takes three bites: the Marketplace takes 10%, selling your L$ on the LindeX takes 5%, and cashing out takes another 5% (minimum $3). That’s about 19% gone before it reaches your bank. On Kitely it’s one fee: 10% if you take Kitely Credits, or 20% if you take US dollars straight to PayPal, with no currency to exchange. So for cash it’s roughly a wash, but it’s simpler, and if you spend your earnings in-world, KC is half what SL charges.

Learn more about Kitely Market Here

Sources: Kitely Market Fees, SL Marketplace listing guidelines, SL pricing.

How Kitely benefits you

Beyond the sales, here’s what you actually get to play with.

• You choose where every product can go. Kitely has a fourth permission, Export, on top of Copy, Modify and Transfer. Leave it off and the product stays on Kitely, period. Turn it on and buyers can take it with them across the hypergrid. Your call, product by product.
• A new way to price. You could sell two editions: a regular one that stays on Kitely, and a higher-priced Export Edition for buyers who want to travel with it. People will pay for that freedom.
• A voice that gets heard. On Kitely, user feedback turns into features. Many of the tech upgrades rolling out right now exist because enough residents asked for them. At the last meeting, Ilan asked us whether an avatar standing on a moving object, like a boat deck or a sliding platform, should ride along with it instead of sliding off or falling through. We said yes, please. Think of what that opens up for creators: ships you can stroll around on, rides, moving stages, platform games. Try getting that conversation with the Lindens.
• Worlds that start when you arrive. Kitely worlds spin up when someone visits and shut down a few minutes after the last avatar leaves, so the money goes into better servers instead of empty sims. There’s a bonus for you here too: in SL, the other sims sharing your server can drag down your performance. On Kitely, worlds nobody is visiting aren’t running, so they aren’t eating the resources your world needs.
• Easy to try. Kitely offers new users a 14-day money-back guarantee, so testing the waters costs you very little.
• Friends on the inside. Me, for one. I’ll show you around, help you list your first products, and introduce you to people.

Land so cheap it’s silly

MY KITELY LAND

$20

Per month for 4 sims with 60k prims shared across all 4

Don’t worry about the cost of a store, or even a whole sim, on Kitely. It’s so inexpensive it’s just plain exciting. I pay $19 a month for my 2×2 world. That’s four sims. A friend of mine runs an 8×8 world, the equivalent of 64 sims, for about $120 a month. Now for the coughing and choking part: in SL, I pay over $560 a month for two full regions and one grandfathered homestead. That’s a car payment. On Kitely, four sims cost me $20.

That means room to really create: a flagship store, a showroom, a demo area, a test sim for experiments, a whole themed world built around your brand. Go big. It won’t break the bank.

Here’s my favorite part. On my four sims, nothing lives in a holo-rezzer. All my builds are just out, set into towns and mountain landscapes, so shoppers see each piece in the kind of place it was made for. Walk around, poke at things, imagine it on your land. I really love it, and your customers will too.

What’s coming (and why I’m excited)

Kitely is in a building season right now, with the team fully focused on the grid and shipping upgrade after upgrade. For creators, that means getting in at the moment things take off, not after. Here’s what’s landed and what’s on the way:

Just landed (October 2026)

• Worlds start about 3x faster, even big ones with 15,000+ scripts.
• No more surprise restarts. Kitely shut down the AI scraping bots that were knocking worlds over.
• Security patched in minutes. When a nasty batch of internet-wide security holes hit this month, Kitely took its blog and forums offline until patches came out, then patched within minutes.

Coming soon

• Physics about 10x faster in testing, with fixes for things getting stuck underground. Due within a couple of weeks.
• Positional voice on Kitely’s own servers, being announced now, so you hear where each voice comes from. Perfect for product launches and live events.
• Load your own saved builds into any spot in your world. An OAR file is a saved copy of a region’s builds. Soon you’ll be able to load one into part of your world without wiping everything else. Picture swapping in your holiday store display, or a brand-new showroom, in one step while the rest of your world stays exactly as it is.
• Ongoing security hardening of the OpenSim code itself, closing holes that are still open on other grids.

And one I’m personally pushing for: SL-style Experiences. Ilan says it’ll happen when enough of us fill the events calendar and build activity worlds. So, creators, let’s give him a reason.

“But will they steal my stuff?”

This is the question, so let’s take it head on. The short answer: a product kept No-Export on Kitely is as safe as anything you sell in SL. Here’s why.

First, the truth about SL

I hate to be the one to tell you, but SL can’t stop copybots either. The SL viewer is open source, and anything your viewer has to download to draw on screen (mesh, textures, shapes) can be captured by a modified viewer, tweaked, and re-uploaded. SL can catch an exact copy; it can’t catch one with a single pixel changed. Everyone at that meeting with a technical background agreed. So the risk you’re worried about on Kitely? You already live with it in SL.

No-Export is a lock

• It’s the default. Kitely Marketplace products start as No-Export. You have to choose to open the door.
• It can’t hypergrid out. Every Kitely account has a special folder called My Suitcase, and only Export items can go in it. When someone travels off Kitely, the Suitcase is the only part of their inventory that exists out there. Your No-Export product stays home, invisible to other grids.
• It can’t sneak out in an OAR. OAR files made on Kitely leave out No-Export items entirely.
• It can’t be passed around inside Kitely either. If someone loads an OAR into Kitely, every object comes back owned by its original owner, not the person who loaded it. Kitely can also trace items by ID and shut down accounts that misuse them.
• Your scripts never leave the server. Copybots can’t touch them, same as SL.
• It won’t vanish. Kitely keeps three full system backups going back months, daily backups of every world, and hourly backups of busy ones.

And a bonus for everyone: nothing broken or malicious gets in. When you add a product to the Kitely Marketplace, the system checks it at listing: missing or broken textures and material layers, script problems, and anything that looks wrong. Your customers get products that work, and nobody can slip malicious scripts or broken junk into the Marketplace, so your store sits in a clean, trustworthy neighborhood.

Export is trust

Now the honest part, because I promised. Once you turn Export on, a product can travel to other grids and into OAR files that may end up on a buyer’s own private server. Whoever runs a server controls what’s on it, scripts included. From there, your protection is Kitely’s Terms of Service and your copyright, the same trust you give anyone you sell full-perm to in SL.

One more tip: stick with trusted viewers

With AI making hacking easier every month, this matters more than ever. Don’t log in with unknown or experimental viewers, however shiny their features. Stick with the tried-and-true ones that have real teams, accountability and a security track record. In SL, that’s the official SL viewer or Firestorm. On Kitely or any other OpenSim grid, it’s Firestorm OS: the same Firestorm you know, built to connect to OpenSim grids. Get it only from the official site, firestormviewer.org, on the Downloads page.

So here are my three rules:

Scripters who want hypergrid sales: keep the real logic on your own server and make the in-world script a thin client. A copy is useless without you.

Dip a toe in

You don’t have to move your whole shop. Start small and see how it feels.

1. Make a Kitely account at kitely.com, download Firestorm OS from firestormviewer.org (Downloads page), and log in.
2. Pick 3 to 5 products you’d be least upset to see copied.
3. List them on the Kitely Marketplace with Export off.
4. Watch how sales and permissions behave for a few weeks.
5. If you like what you see, add more, and think about Export Editions for the non-scripted ones.
6. Come say hi at the Sunday community meeting at the Kitely Welcome Center and ask Ilan anything.
7. Dream bigger than a store. Build an experience people can’t get anywhere else: a game, a quest, a themed world around your brand. Kitely wants to market one-of-a-kind experiences beyond the grid to draw new residents in, and that traffic lands right at your door.

And please, reach out to me. IM Filipa Thespian in SL or on Kitely. I’m also Filipa Thespian on Facebook, Flickr, X and Instagram (do you see a pattern too? 😉 ), and on Discord I’m iampip. I’ll give you the tour, answer your questions, and introduce you around. I’ll even wave my arms like a loon for you.

We need you here. The grid is only as good as the things people make for it, and you make beautiful things. Come build something with us.

With love, and more land than you’ll know what to do with,

Filipa