Why this exists
In November 2025 the biggest osu! skin site put its catalogue behind a "watch an ad to use this site for 24 hours" gate. The community thread about it drew 849 upvotes, and the most-upvoted reply was not about the ads:
"all the while skin creators are really the ones who should be compensated for their work and never have been"
That is the actual problem. Skin catalogues treat the skin as the product and the person who made it as a footnote. This one is built the other way round.
What that means concretely
| Creator first | Every skin page names its author and links to their osu! profile and their original forum post. 2,260 creators are credited across 4,086 skins. Creator pages exist for all of them. |
|---|---|
| Nothing re-hosted | We index where a skin lives; we do not mirror it. The download link goes to the author's own upload. The exception is the handful of skins built here — every element drawn from primitives, every hitsound synthesised — which we host because they are ours to host. |
| Dead links marked | Of 7,984 download links tracked, 2,058 are confirmed dead and labelled as such rather than left to waste your time. See the dead-link report. |
| Our own previews | 889 of these previews are drawn here, from the skin's own hit circles, combo font, cursor and judgements, tinted with the combo colours in its skin.ini. They show what you will actually download, and they are not lifted from another catalogue. Where one is missing, the image falls back to o!rdr or the compendium and says so. |
| No gate | No ads, no login, no interstitial, no 24-hour timer. It is a folder of static HTML. One analytics tag and nothing else. |
| Creators can say no | Every skin page and every creator page carries a one-click way to claim it, correct it, or have it removed — one address, 48 hours, no justification asked for. A catalogue that says it puts creators first and gives them no way to object is just a nicer-looking version of what it replaced. |
| Kept, not served | Skins down to their last working link are copied to a cold archive so the file survives the host deleting it. Nothing in that archive is served or linked from anywhere on this site. It exists so a skin can be handed back to its author, not redistributed. |
| Polite by construction | Archive contents are read with HTTP range requests: 561 skins inspected by pulling 33 MB rather than the 12.9 GB those archives actually weigh — we read each zip's index and its skin.ini, not the whole file, so nobody's hosting pays for our catalogue. |
Where the data comes from
| Source | What it contributes |
|---|---|
| osu! Completed Skins forum | The canonical release post: creator, user id, release date, original download links. |
| skin compendium | Curated catalogue, cover art, game-mode tags. |
| o!rdr | Mirrored .osk files, rendered previews, and render counts — the only public measure of which skins people actually use. |
Are you a skin creator who wants something changed or removed? That should be your call, not ours.