Empowering Pakistan's digital creators.

The problem we started with

In 2024 a Pakistani designer selling Canva templates had three bad options. Sell through Instagram DMs and chase manual bank transfers, with no buyer protection in either direction. List on an international platform and discover at payout time that the money cannot legally or practically reach a local account. Or build a personal website and spend more on hosting, payment integration and delivery infrastructure than the first year of sales would return.

None of those options fail because Pakistani creators lack skill. They fail because the payment and trust layer was never built for this market. That is the specific gap Waqaram closes.

What we actually operate

Waqaram is a full marketplace, not a storefront builder. We run the catalogue, the payment rails, the escrow account, the file delivery, the dispute process and the payout schedule. A seller uploads a file and sets a price; everything between that upload and money landing in their wallet is our responsibility.

• Payments: JazzCash, Easypaisa, Raast, bank transfer and card, all settled in PKR.
• Escrow: buyer funds are held until delivery is confirmed, then released to the seller on the payout cycle.
• Delivery: signed, expiring download links so a paid file cannot be scraped and redistributed from a public URL.
• Disputes: a documented review process where both sides submit evidence before any refund decision.
• Discovery: category pages, search, editorial content and a product feed submitted to shopping surfaces.

How we make money, stated plainly

Joining costs a free registration, with your first 2 listings included. Sellers can instead pay a one-time Rs 499 Premium upgrade to list unlimited products for life. We also take a commission on each completed sale. There is no charge for hosting files or bandwidth, and there are no recurring fees.

We think that alignment matters. A subscription platform earns whether or not you sell; a commission platform only earns when you do. The current rate and what it covers is published on the pricing page rather than buried in a contract.

The standards we hold listings to

Every seller application is reviewed by a person before the store goes live, and every product is checked against a published quality bar. This slows onboarding by a day, and it is the reason buyers trust the catalogue enough to pay in advance for a file they have not seen.

Who Waqaram is for

On the seller side: freelancers packaging their expertise, teachers turning a syllabus into a course, designers with an asset library, students selling exam notes, and small agencies productising a service. If you want a practical starting point, read the selling guide and the deeper Pakistan seller playbook.

On the buyer side: students, freelancers, small business owners and creators who want a specific asset today rather than a subscription to a library they will not finish. Browse categories or start with courses.

Where we are going next

The roadmap is driven by seller requests rather than feature fashion. Current priorities are faster payout cycles, richer store analytics so sellers can see which traffic source converts, and better discovery for Urdu-language products, which are structurally underserved by search engines tuned for English.

We publish what changes and why. Product updates, market research and seller case studies go on the blog, and anything affecting your money or your data is emailed directly rather than quietly edited into a policy page.

Accountability and contact

We are a Pakistan-based team, reachable by email and through the help center. Our commitments on data handling are in the privacy policy, the rules of the marketplace are in the terms of service, and refund entitlements are in the refund policy. Those documents are written to be read, not to be survived.

How we make money, stated plainly

Waqaram earns a commission on completed sales, a free seller registration, 2 free listings for every new seller, and an optional one-time Rs 499 Premium upgrade for unlimited listings for life. There is no recurring charge for keeping a store open, which means the platform mostly earns when a seller earns. That alignment is deliberate: a marketplace funded by subscriptions has an incentive to sign up sellers who never sell, while a marketplace funded by commission has an incentive to help every listing convert.

We do not sell buyer data, we do not run paid placement that outranks better products, and we do not charge sellers to appear in search results. Ranking is driven by relevance, conversion and review quality. The current commission bands and payout schedule are published on the pricing page rather than negotiated privately, so every seller sees the same numbers.

What we are building next

The roadmap is shaped by seller requests rather than by feature parity with international platforms. Priorities for the current cycle are richer store analytics so sellers can see which traffic source converts, bundle pricing so a course and its templates can be sold together at a discount, and expanded Urdu-language interface coverage across checkout and the seller dashboard.

Longer term, the same infrastructure extends naturally to physical goods and to buyers outside Pakistan paying in other currencies. We are deliberately not rushing either, because the local digital market is large, underserved and still the fastest way for a Pakistani creator to earn from their own work. If you want to influence what ships, the community forum is where feature requests are discussed openly, and contact reaches the team directly.

We also publish what we learn instead of keeping it internal. The market data behind our pricing bands, the payout comparisons, the conversion patterns we see across thousands of listings: all of it ends up on the Waqaram blog because a better informed seller is a better seller, whether or not they list with us. That is the same reason our fees are public rather than negotiated, our dispute process is written down rather than improvised, and our support answers explain the reasoning instead of quoting policy at people. A marketplace is only as credible as the least generous thing it does quietly, so we try not to do anything quietly.