One of the angles I’ve been exploring is whether our team can recoup some of our automation platform costs by selling workflows and automation templates on a marketplace.
The pitch is logical: we build internal automations, some of them might be useful to others, we package them up, sell them on a marketplace, and that revenue offsets our licensing costs.
But I’m wondering if that’s realistic or if it’s one of those things that sounds good in theory but doesn’t actually generate meaningful revenue. Like, are there actually companies buying automations on marketplaces? Are the transaction volumes significant enough to move the needle on licensing costs, or is this more of a side project that generates pocket change?
And from a cost structure perspective: if we’re selling automations, does our licensing model change? Do we need different infrastructure? Does the marketplace take a cut that makes the math not work?
Has anyone actually used marketplace revenue to subsidize their automation platform licensing, or am I overthinking this?
We tried marketplace revenue for about a year. Here’s the honest truth: it didn’t meaningfully offset our licensing costs, but it had other benefits we didn’t anticipate.
Revenue-wise, we sold maybe 15-20 automations per month at around $50-100 each. That’s not going to pay for a platform license in most cases. Our annual licensing cost was around $30k, and marketplace revenue was maybe $10-15k annually. So it covered maybe 40% of the cost, which isn’t nothing but wasn’t life-changing.
What surprised us was the non-financial benefit. The act of packaging automations for internal reuse became institutionalized. Instead of each team solving the same problem independently, we had a shared library of solutions. That reduced duplicate work across teams way more than the marketplace revenue did.
The marketplace was less about generating revenue and more about creating organizational efficiency. The licensing cost reduction came from the templating and sharing culture we built, not from selling to external customers.
The math gets different if you’re part of a larger ecosystem where marketplace activity is more mature, but for us, it was low value as a revenue line and high value as an internal knowledge management tool.
The platform provider usually takes 20-30% of revenue, which cuts into already-thin margins on small transactions. Some automations aren’t actually reusable across companies because they’re too specific to internal business logic. The ones that are generic enough to sell broadly are usually too generic to be valuable.
We focused less on revenue and more on internal reuse. We set up an internal marketplace where different teams could share automations within the company. That eliminated duplicate work and made it easier for teams to discover existing solutions instead of rebuilding.
A data validation automation that one team built became available to six other teams. That wasn’t marketplace revenue, but it was tangible value: six teams didn’t have to spend development time building that same workflow.
If licensing costs are your concern, internal marketplace efficiency is probably the real lever, not external marketplace revenue. The licensing reduction comes from building automation infrastructure that’s more reusable, shared, and efficiently utilized across your organization.
External marketplace revenue is modest, maybe 10-30% of licensing costs. Internal sharing efficiency is bigger: eliminates duplicate automation work across teams, reducing real licensing overhead.
We explored marketplace revenue too, and here’s what we found: the direct revenue doesn’t move the needle much, but the infrastructure you build for sharing does.
We created internal scenarios and templates that teams could reuse. One team built a data validation workflow, another team adapted it for their needs, a third team used that pattern for something slightly different. Suddenly we weren’t licensing three separate automation instances; we were licensing one solution that three teams leveraged.
When you count that kind of efficiency—eliminating duplicate work, reusing components across workflows—the cost reduction is real. One subscription was suddenly powering more automation work because we were efficient about reuse.
The platform’s marketplace and scenario sharing features made that efficiency possible. We weren’t making a ton of external marketplace revenue, but internally we were consolidating automation work onto a single platform subscription instead of needing separate licenses for each team or workflow.
selling scenarios on the external marketplace generated maybe 10-15% of licensing costs back. But building that marketplace-ready discipline into how we designed automations reduced our total licensing needs by probably 30% because we stopped duplicating work.