I’ve been looking at different automation platforms, and one feature that keeps popping up is the ability to publish workflows to a marketplace so others can buy and use them. The pitch is that if you build something useful, you can generate revenue from it and offset your own subscription costs.
But I’m genuinely skeptical about whether this is a real revenue stream or just a novelty feature that sounds good in marketing materials. A few questions:
First, is there actual demand? How many people are actively buying pre-built workflows on these marketplaces? I can imagine buying a template to save time, but paying for someone else’s customized workflow feels like a different value calculation.
Second, if you do sell something, what’s the revenue split? Who handles support when someone buys your workflow and it breaks in their environment? What’s your liability if your automation has a bug that costs them money?
Third, what’s the actual market? Are these marketplaces attracting serious buyers, or is it mostly people tinkering on the side?
I ask because our teams do build some genuinely reusable automations. If there’s a legitimate way to generate revenue from that intellectual property, that changes the ROI calculation on the platform license itself. But I want to make sure I’m not chasing micro-revenue that doesn’t actually offset anything meaningful.
I’ll be honest—the revenue from selling workflows isn’t going to offset your subscription cost in most cases. But that’s not really the point.
We’ve published a few workflows to a marketplace. One is a fairly specialized lead enrichment automation that pulls data from multiple sources and scores quality. In the first three months, we made about $800 from it. Not enough to meaningfully impact our licensing costs.
But here’s what actually happened: that workflow became visible to potential enterprise customers who were evaluating the platform. A few of them reached out asking if we could build custom versions for them. That became actual consulting revenue, which was more valuable than the marketplace sales themselves.
So the marketplace functions more as a portfolio piece than a revenue stream. You’re showing that you understand the platform well enough to build something other people want.
On the liability and support side, that depends entirely on the platform’s terms of service. You need to read the fine print. In most cases, you’re not liable for damages—customers are buying a tool as-is. But if someone buys your workflow and it breaks, you do get support requests in your inbox. Some people are cool about helping; some expect commercial support.
The demand is real, but it’s focused. People buy workflow templates when they’re solving a specific problem and don’t have time to build it themselves. But you’re right to be skeptical about meaningful revenue streams.
What I’ve noticed is that successful marketplace items are either highly specialized (solving a particular business problem really well) or they’re bundled products (someone built a complete workflow system and sells access to the whole thing).
The revenue split varies by platform. Some take a 30% cut, some take more. You handle first-line support unless you explicitly opt out.
If your team is already building reusable automations for internal use, documenting and publishing them takes minimal extra effort. The question isn’t whether marketplace revenue will offset your costs—it won’t. The question is whether having your workflows available shifts how your company is perceived in your market.
Marketplace revenue is minimal. Real value is visibility and case studies, not direct revenue. Don’t expect it to impact licensing costs significantly.
I’ve seen this work differently on Latenode’s marketplace because the whole model incentivizes sharing workflows that leverage their AI integration layer. When you build something that uses AI agents or multiple model orchestration, it’s genuinely hard to replicate—that increases the perceived value.
One team we know built an autonomous customer service flow that routes inquiries to the right AI agent based on complexity. They priced it at $49/month for usage access and made about $2,400 in the first quarter. Not transformative revenue, but meaningful.
The key difference is that because Latenode handles the infrastructure side, your workflows are genuinely portable. You’re not bundling infrastructure costs into the price—you’re selling the logic and orchestration skill.
You’re right to think about this as an ROI component though. Not for direct revenue, but for positioning. If you build something valuable and discoverable, it changes how prospects perceive your technical capability.