For Visitors

You don't need an account to read this page. You don't need an account to read anything on Hobbsy. We want you to know what kind of place this is before you decide whether it's a place you want to spend time.

What Hobbsy is

Hobbsy is a marketplace for handmade goods made by humans. Pottery, jewelry, prints, knitwear, woodwork, soap, candles, art, vintage finds, things people make with their hands and their attention. Every seller on the platform is a person making things, not a generator producing files.

That sounds obvious until you visit some of the other places that used to mean the same thing. The handmade marketplace category has been quietly overrun by AI-generated images sold as original art and mass-produced goods listed as handmade crafts. Many of the platforms that started out as places for makers have stopped caring whether their listings are actually made by anyone.

Hobbsy's whole reason to exist is that we still care.

What that means in practice

When you see a listing on Hobbsy, you can trust that:

• A real person made the thing being sold.
• The photos show the actual product you would receive.
• No AI generated the artwork, the design, the model, or the form.
• If the item is rare, vintage, or its provenance is uncertain, the seller has an option to tell you exactly how confident they are about the identification.
• If a listing breaks our policy, you can report it and a human moderator — not an AI — will review it.

What about AI on the platform side?

Hobbsy itself is built with AI tools, the same way most modern software is. Our sellers can use AI to write product descriptions, suggest tags, translate listings into other languages, and help with customer service responses. None of that affects what you receive when you buy something — it just helps the seller run their business.

We make a clean distinction between AI that helps a person sell their work and AI that creates the work itself. The first is a tool. The second is, in our view, a different product entirely — one we don't sell here.

Some categories require disclosure

A few legitimate creative practices use AI in ways that buyers should know about so they can make informed choices. These are allowed on Hobbsy, but the seller is required to disclose them:

• AI-narrated audiobooks — an author's own writing, narrated by an AI voice instead of a human narrator. Required because some buyers want a human voice performance and have the right to filter these out.
• Procedural / generative art — art produced by code that the artist wrote. This is a 60+ year old art form (Vera Molnár, Casey Reas, Tyler Hobbs) that predates modern AI by decades, but buyers may not understand the production method without explicit notice.

Some categories — like AI assistance with identification of vintage items — also recommend disclosure for buyer protection but don't require it. Sellers who voluntarily disclose tend to have fewer disputes, so we make it easy for them.

The deeper version

The pages for buyers, sellers, and moderation standards go into more detail. If you sign up to buy or sell, you'll see them surfaced in places where they're relevant. You can also read them now without an account — Hobbsy doesn't hide its policies behind a login wall.

If this matters to you

If the difference between human-made and AI-made matters to you — as a buyer, a seller, or just someone who cares about what's happening to creative work — then Hobbsy is the kind of place we hope you'll find worth supporting.