Which marketplaces pay the people who build for them
Every row below was checked on one question: is there an official way to sell your work there, what does the platform take, and is there any evidence that a creator was actually paid. Some rows cover a group of platforms that all behave the same way. Every number carries the date it was measured, and anything that could not be confirmed at the source says so.
What the data says
Marketplaces pay for craft and do not pay for configuration.
Every platform in this set that sells a designed artifact has a cash register, and commissions there fall toward zero to attract creators. Every platform that sells a set of rules and settings has no cash register at all, including ones with billion-dollar valuations. The reason is that a generative model reproduces configuration on request and does not yet reproduce a designed layout.
Subscriptions beat one-time sales by 10-20x on the same platform.
Zeroqode: templates earned about $1.09M over five and a half years while plugin subscriptions were valued at $2-4M per year. Same seller, same platform, same audience. Bubble's own rules encode it, capping templates at $500 one-time and leaving plugin subscriptions uncapped.
Commission is inversely proportional to distribution.
Wherever creators keep 85-90%, there is either no traffic, or entry is closed, or the pool is tiny. Fab pays $24M across 20,000 publishers. No platform in this set offers a generous rate and real traffic at once. Framer comes closest, at the cost of admitting everyone without review since June 2026.
AI kills the template market wherever the platform builds the generator itself.
This is documented, not predicted. Webflow paused its App Gen after five months and raised payouts to 95%. Bubble committed to its AI builder and its sellers report the collapse by name. Two platforms, opposite bets, opposite marketplace outcomes.
Platforms that sell craft, and pay
A designed artifact: a layout, an asset, a piece of real code. Every platform in this group has a working cash register.
| Platform | Platform takes | Evidence anyone was paid | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| FramerWebsite templates and plugins | 0% | $6.5M paid to creators across 2025, and $753K in November 2025 alone. The only marketplace in this set that publishes its total payouts.A separate referral program pays 50% of a referred user's subscription for twelve months, which creators report as larger than template sales. Price ceiling is around $149. | Platform publishes payoutsconfirmed at source |
| Fab (Epic)Game assets | 12% | $24M paid across 2025 to 20,000 publishers, which averages about $1,200 per publisher per year.Discount events can account for up to half of monthly revenue. | Platform publishes payoutsconfirmed at source |
| WebflowWebsite templates | 5% | Moved to 95% for creators on 21 October 2025 and added fulfillment links, letting creators sell anywhere at 0% commission. Total payouts are not published.Paused its own AI app generator five months after launch, in the same period it raised creator payouts. | Platform terms onlyconfirmed at source |
| Figma CommunityDesign files, plugins, widgets | 15% | Best headline rate among the large design platforms.The rate is only useful to people already inside. | Platform terms onlyconfirmed at source |
| monday.comApps | 15% after $200K | 850 apps serving 250,000 customers, the lowest competitive density in this set. 49% of accounts and 87% of enterprise accounts have installed something.Documentation only states 85/15 after $200,000 in lifetime revenue. What the platform takes below that threshold is not published anywhere, so the common reading of "first $200K free" is an inference, not a quote. Billing, tax and renewals sit with the platform; payouts via Payoneer. | Platform terms onlypartly confirmed |
| Unity Asset StoreAssets and editor tools | 30% | 1.7M store users per month across 12,000 publishers. Payout totals are not disclosed.For a developer the opening is editor tooling rather than art. Historic top sellers are tools. | Platform terms onlyconfirmed at source |
| Superhive (Blender Market)Blender add-ons | 30%, down to 10% | 70% to the creator, up to 90% with a paid subscription. 125,000 unique visitors per month.Historic top sellers are Python tools, not art assets. | Platform terms onlyconfirmed at source |
| DiscordApps and bots | 15%, rising to 30% | A working payment mechanism across 12M+ active bots. | Platform terms onlyconfirmed at source |
| EnvatoThemes, templates, assets | 50% | Reported move to a flat 50% for all authors from 1 July 2026, down from as little as 12.5% for exclusive authors.Could not be confirmed. author.envato.com, the author help centre and the blog all return 403 to direct requests, and author rates sit behind an author login. | Secondary sourcenot confirmed |
Platforms that sell configuration
A set of rules and settings that a generative model reproduces from a paragraph of description. Some of these have a cash register. Almost none have proof that it pays anyone.
| Platform | Platform takes | Evidence anyone was paid | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| NotionWorkspace templates | 10% | Confirmed ceiling around $1M/year: Thomas Frank reported $1,000,508 in 2022, and his Ultimate Brain shows 15,098 sales on Gumroad's own counter. Easlo's Second Brain shows 7,067. Below the top handful, public numbers vanish; one widely shared success story is a breakdown of earning $250.Notion 3.0 agents, shipped 18 September 2025, generate on request what a $19-49 template contains. The remaining protection is that agents require a paid Notion AI plan. | Platform's own sales counterconfirmed at source |
| n8nWorkflow templates | no payment mechanism | All 11,128 templates scanned through the public API: 1,215 paid listings from 260 sellers, median 30 sales and $308 in lifetime revenue per paid template. The entire paid catalog is worth roughly $374K.The platform lends its domain's credibility to transactions it does not process, which has produced a fraud problem. | Full scan of the catalogconfirmed at source |
| ObsidianPlugins and vaults | no store exists | Roughly 16 fully paid plugins out of 6,244. A plugin with 5M downloads has three sponsors. The top paid product in the whole category on Gumroad has 51 reviews all-time.Interest in "obsidian template" grew faster than any other niche measured, from 1.5 in 2022 to 9.3 in 2026, overtaking Framer, n8n and Webflow. Money here goes to courses and $199-1,697 vaults sold to an existing audience. The absence of a store may mean an unserved niche, or an audience not in the habit of paying. | Full scan of the catalogconfirmed at source |
| CodaPacks only | 30% | Highest commission among the document platforms, on a very small market.Templates cannot be sold at all, only Packs. The brand is being absorbed into Grammarly/Superhuman. | Platform terms onlyconfirmed at source |
| ClickUp, Airtable, Asana, Linear, Slack, Tally, Typeform, MiroTemplates | no payment mechanism | Templates are the platforms' own content marketing. Miro states in plain text that template creators are not paid by Miro.Airtable's stated strategy: "when the cost of building apps drops to zero, everything changes." | Platform terms onlyconfirmed at source |
| Lovable, Replit, Bolt, v0/Vercel, RetoolApp templates | no payment mechanism | Lovable paid creators $0 while reaching $200M+ ARR in 18 months. Replit closed Bounties on 6 September 2025 and raised at a $9B valuation six months later.The "Lovable marketplace with 90% payouts" that circulates is a third party's side project hosted on Lovable, not a Lovable product. | Platform terms onlyconfirmed at source |
| Home Assistant, CapCut, LightroomConfigs, effects, presets | no payment mechanism | HACS installs from public repositories, so a paywall is technically awkward. CapCut has iterated its creator program repeatedly without ever naming a payout rate. Adobe has no marketplace for third-party presets at all.Lightroom's own adaptive AI presets attack the value of the product directly. | Platform terms onlyconfirmed at source |
| BubbleApp templates and plugins | 25% | A seller in July 2026 reported roughly $1,000 for 500+ hours of work, about $2 an hour, and named the platform's AI builder as the cause.Platform rules cap templates at $500 one-time while plugin subscriptions have no ceiling, which is the clearest statement anywhere that subscriptions beat one-time sales. | Seller's own reportconfirmed at source |
| EtsyDigital templates | not measured | No public evidence of anyone being paid.Excluded from conclusions. Etsy blocks automated access and even a live browser session, and its bot protection was not worked around. Sales counters for spreadsheet and ClickUp templates remain unknown. | Not measurednot confirmed |
The agent layer
The most discussed new niche of 2026 has no payment mechanism in any of its registries. This is not a gap in the research; the schemas were read directly and the fields do not exist.
Claude Code plugin marketplace
A marketplace.json file in a .claude-plugin/ directory of a git repository
The plugin entry schema accepts name, source, displayName, description, version, author, homepage, repository, license, keywords, category, tags, strict, relevance, defaultEnabled and component paths. The only commerce-adjacent field is license, which wants an SPDX identifier. The one cost the interface reports is Context cost, measured in tokens and charged every turn.
Official MCP registry
Public registry API; servers install from public repositories
A server in the API schema has name, description, title, repository, version, websiteUrl, icons, $schema, packages, remotes and _meta. No price, billing or access-control field exists.
Glama MCP index
Directory of public MCP servers
66,972 servers listed, none carrying a price, licenses skewing MIT and Apache-2.0. The same index read 66,930 the previous day: 42 new servers in 24 hours, all free.
Cursor Directory
Open directory of rules, MCP servers and plugins
Submission only, no prices anywhere. The developer count could not be confirmed: the site returned HTTP 429 on 2026-08-02 and the figure is left out rather than repeated second-hand.
Supply against demand, on the most crowded platform
The counter is served by Notion, so its history could be recovered exactly rather than estimated. The "30,000+ templates" headline on Notion's own site has not changed since January 2025 and is not usable as a measurement.
Search interest for “notion template”, same years
- Demand for Notion templates grew about 58% since 2022 and has been flat for two years, while creator supply grew roughly tenfold. The market is saturating from the seller side, not dying from the buyer side.
- "obsidian template" grew faster than every other niche measured and passed Framer, n8n and Webflow in 2026, while the category has almost no paid products.
- "n8n template" peaked in 2025 and is already falling: 7.4 average across 2026 but 5.8 over the last twelve weeks, matching the 85% collapse in paid supply.
How this was measured
Platform terms, creator-program pages and public help docs were read directly. Sales counts come from the JSON embedded in Gumroad product pages. The n8n figures come from scanning all 11,128 templates in its public API. The Notion creator counter is served by Notion and its history was recovered from the Wayback Machine. Google Trends numbers were pulled from its API, 240 weekly points per query, all five niches measured in one comparative request so the values are directly comparable. Agent-layer schemas were read from the vendors' own reference docs and OpenAPI files. Anything that could not be confirmed at the source is marked unverified and says why.
Take the numbers and use them. The dataset is CC BY 4.0 and sits at /marketplaces/data.json in the same shape as this page. A live market moves, so every figure carries the date it was taken and you can re-check any of them.
Send a number
Rates change, and a few rows here are weaker than we would like: Envato’s author rate sits behind a login, Etsy’s counters behind bot protection. If you sell on one of these platforms and your own figures differ from the table, write in with what you sold, what the platform kept, and where that can be checked. Anything that holds up at the source goes in with the date on it and credit to you, unless you would rather not be named. What cannot be confirmed goes in as well, marked unconfirmed, on the same terms as our own rows.
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