{"schemaVersion":1,"title":"Which marketplaces pay the people who build for them","lastMeasured":"2026-08-02","license":"CC BY 4.0","attribution":"Prompt Receipts, https://www.promptreceipts.com/marketplaces","method":"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.","platforms":[{"id":"framer","name":"Framer","artifact":"Website templates and plugins","sells":"craft","pays":true,"commission":0,"commissionLabel":"0%","evidence":"$6.5M paid to creators across 2025, and $753K in November 2025 alone. The only marketplace in this set that publishes its total payouts.","evidenceStrength":"published-by-platform","competition":"8,600 templates. The review requirement was dropped in June 2026, so anyone can publish.","note":"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.","measured":"2026-08-01","verified":true},{"id":"webflow","name":"Webflow","artifact":"Website templates","sells":"craft","pays":true,"commission":5,"commissionLabel":"5%","evidence":"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.","evidenceStrength":"platform-terms","competition":"7,000+ templates, roughly 300 approved designers. Entry is juried and strict.","note":"Paused its own AI app generator five months after launch, in the same period it raised creator payouts.","measured":"2026-08-01","verified":true},{"id":"figma","name":"Figma Community","artifact":"Design files, plugins, widgets","sells":"craft","pays":true,"commission":15,"commissionLabel":"15%","evidence":"Best headline rate among the large design platforms.","evidenceStrength":"platform-terms","competition":"Closed. New seller intake is not open.","note":"The rate is only useful to people already inside.","measured":"2026-08-01","verified":true},{"id":"monday","name":"monday.com","artifact":"Apps","sells":"craft","pays":true,"commission":15,"commissionLabel":"15% after $200K","evidence":"850 apps serving 250,000 customers, the lowest competitive density in this set. 49% of accounts and 87% of enterprise accounts have installed something.","evidenceStrength":"platform-terms","competition":"Low. The barrier is real code plus review.","note":"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.","measured":"2026-08-01","verified":"partial"},{"id":"notion","name":"Notion","artifact":"Workspace templates","sells":"configuration","pays":true,"commission":10,"commissionLabel":"10%","evidence":"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.","evidenceStrength":"platform-counter","competition":"21,198 creators, up from roughly 2,000 in June 2023. The tightest entry in this set.","note":"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.","measured":"2026-08-01","verified":true},{"id":"unity","name":"Unity Asset Store","artifact":"Assets and editor tools","sells":"craft","pays":true,"commission":30,"commissionLabel":"30%","evidence":"1.7M store users per month across 12,000 publishers. Payout totals are not disclosed.","evidenceStrength":"platform-terms","competition":"13,000 top assets, 12,000 publishers.","note":"For a developer the opening is editor tooling rather than art. Historic top sellers are tools.","measured":"2026-08-01","verified":true},{"id":"superhive","name":"Superhive (Blender Market)","artifact":"Blender add-ons","sells":"craft","pays":true,"commission":30,"commissionLabel":"30%, down to 10%","evidence":"70% to the creator, up to 90% with a paid subscription. 125,000 unique visitors per month.","evidenceStrength":"platform-terms","competition":"Moderate.","note":"Historic top sellers are Python tools, not art assets.","measured":"2026-08-01","verified":true},{"id":"fab","name":"Fab (Epic)","artifact":"Game assets","sells":"craft","pays":true,"commission":12,"commissionLabel":"12%","evidence":"$24M paid across 2025 to 20,000 publishers, which averages about $1,200 per publisher per year.","evidenceStrength":"published-by-platform","competition":"420,000 listings, 20,000 publishers.","note":"Discount events can account for up to half of monthly revenue.","measured":"2026-08-01","verified":true},{"id":"envato","name":"Envato","artifact":"Themes, templates, assets","sells":"craft","pays":true,"commission":50,"commissionLabel":"50%","evidence":"Reported move to a flat 50% for all authors from 1 July 2026, down from as little as 12.5% for exclusive authors.","evidenceStrength":"secondary-source","competition":"The largest historic marketplace in this set.","note":"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.","measured":"2026-08-01","verified":false},{"id":"discord","name":"Discord","artifact":"Apps and bots","sells":"craft","pays":true,"commission":15,"commissionLabel":"15%, rising to 30%","evidence":"A working payment mechanism across 12M+ active bots.","evidenceStrength":"platform-terms","competition":"High, but the market is gaming and community rather than work.","note":null,"measured":"2026-08-01","verified":true},{"id":"coda","name":"Coda","artifact":"Packs only","sells":"configuration","pays":true,"commission":30,"commissionLabel":"30%","evidence":"Highest commission among the document platforms, on a very small market.","evidenceStrength":"platform-terms","competition":"Tiny.","note":"Templates cannot be sold at all, only Packs. The brand is being absorbed into Grammarly/Superhuman.","measured":"2026-08-01","verified":true},{"id":"bubble","name":"Bubble","artifact":"App templates and plugins","sells":"configuration","pays":true,"commission":25,"commissionLabel":"25%","evidence":"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.","evidenceStrength":"seller-report","competition":"1,652 templates, up 18% in three years.","note":"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.","measured":"2026-08-01","verified":true},{"id":"n8n","name":"n8n","artifact":"Workflow templates","sells":"configuration","pays":false,"commission":null,"commissionLabel":"no payment mechanism","evidence":"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.","evidenceStrength":"full-scan","competition":"Paid supply fell 85% since June 2025.","note":"The platform lends its domain's credibility to transactions it does not process, which has produced a fraud problem.","measured":"2026-08-01","verified":true},{"id":"obsidian","name":"Obsidian","artifact":"Plugins and vaults","sells":"configuration","pays":false,"commission":null,"commissionLabel":"no store exists","evidence":"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.","evidenceStrength":"full-scan","competition":"Almost none, and no mechanism either.","note":"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.","measured":"2026-08-01","verified":true},{"id":"clickup-airtable-asana-linear-slack-miro","name":"ClickUp, Airtable, Asana, Linear, Slack, Tally, Typeform, Miro","artifact":"Templates","sells":"configuration","pays":false,"commission":null,"commissionLabel":"no payment mechanism","evidence":"Templates are the platforms' own content marketing. Miro states in plain text that template creators are not paid by Miro.","evidenceStrength":"platform-terms","competition":"Irrelevant, there is nothing to compete for.","note":"Airtable's stated strategy: \"when the cost of building apps drops to zero, everything changes.\"","measured":"2026-08-01","verified":true},{"id":"lovable-replit-bolt-v0-retool","name":"Lovable, Replit, Bolt, v0/Vercel, Retool","artifact":"App templates","sells":"configuration","pays":false,"commission":null,"commissionLabel":"no payment mechanism","evidence":"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.","evidenceStrength":"platform-terms","competition":"Irrelevant.","note":"The \"Lovable marketplace with 90% payouts\" that circulates is a third party's side project hosted on Lovable, not a Lovable product.","measured":"2026-08-01","verified":true},{"id":"home-assistant-capcut-lightroom","name":"Home Assistant, CapCut, Lightroom","artifact":"Configs, effects, presets","sells":"configuration","pays":false,"commission":null,"commissionLabel":"no payment mechanism","evidence":"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.","evidenceStrength":"platform-terms","competition":"Irrelevant.","note":"Lightroom's own adaptive AI presets attack the value of the product directly.","measured":"2026-08-01","verified":true},{"id":"etsy","name":"Etsy","artifact":"Digital templates","sells":"configuration","pays":true,"commission":null,"commissionLabel":"not measured","evidence":null,"evidenceStrength":"none","competition":"Unknown.","note":"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.","measured":null,"verified":false}],"agentLayer":{"summary":"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.","registries":[{"id":"claude-code-plugins","name":"Claude Code plugin marketplace","distribution":"A marketplace.json file in a .claude-plugin/ directory of a git repository","priceField":false,"listings":null,"detail":"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.","source":"https://code.claude.com/docs/en/plugin-marketplaces","measured":"2026-08-02","verified":true},{"id":"mcp-registry","name":"Official MCP registry","distribution":"Public registry API; servers install from public repositories","priceField":false,"listings":null,"detail":"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.","source":"https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/registry","measured":"2026-08-02","verified":true},{"id":"glama","name":"Glama MCP index","distribution":"Directory of public MCP servers","priceField":false,"listings":66972,"detail":"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.","source":"https://glama.ai/mcp/servers","measured":"2026-08-02","verified":true},{"id":"cursor-directory","name":"Cursor Directory","distribution":"Open directory of rules, MCP servers and plugins","priceField":false,"listings":null,"detail":"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.","source":"https://cursor.directory/","measured":"2026-08-02","verified":"partial"}]},"notionSupply":{"label":"Creators on the Notion template marketplace","note":"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.","measured":"2026-08-01","points":[{"date":"2023-06","creators":2000,"approximate":true},{"date":"2024-01","creators":4441,"approximate":false},{"date":"2024-09","creators":8303,"approximate":false},{"date":"2025-01","creators":11352,"approximate":false},{"date":"2025-12","creators":17151,"approximate":false},{"date":"2026-08","creators":21198,"approximate":false}]},"demand":{"label":"Google Trends interest, worldwide","note":"240 weekly points per query. The five niches were measured in a single comparative request, so the values can be compared directly against each other, which is not true of separately captured Trends screenshots.","measured":"2026-08-01","byYear":{"notion template":{"2022":25.9,"2023":36.5,"2024":34.3,"2025":41.5,"2026":41},"obsidian template":{"2022":1.5,"2026":9.3},"framer template":{"2022":0,"2026":7.9},"n8n template":{"2022":0,"2025":7.8,"2026":7.4},"webflow template":{"2022":2.5,"2026":5.5}},"readings":["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."]},"patterns":[{"id":"craft-vs-configuration","claim":"Marketplaces pay for craft and do not pay for configuration.","support":"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."},{"id":"subscription-beats-one-time","claim":"Subscriptions beat one-time sales by 10-20x on the same platform.","support":"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."},{"id":"commission-vs-distribution","claim":"Commission is inversely proportional to distribution.","support":"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."},{"id":"ai-builders-kill-their-own-marketplace","claim":"AI kills the template market wherever the platform builds the generator itself.","support":"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."}]}