One of the features I keep hearing about is the ability to develop automations and sell them on a marketplace. The theory is compelling—build something useful, package it as a template, let others adopt it and pay you recurring revenue. It sounds like a nice passive income layer on top of your licensing costs.
But I’m genuinely uncertain whether this is a real revenue stream or a nice-to-have feature that works for maybe 2% of the user base. Like, what actually determines whether a template is valuable enough for someone to pay for it? Is there real market demand or would most people just build what they need internally?
I’m also trying to understand the licensing dynamics. If I create a template and sell it, am I responsible for maintaining it? What happens to my template if the underlying platform changes? Do I have to version control and support multiple versions? That could be a maintenance nightmare if you’ve got 20 templates with varying adoption.
And there’s the discovery and marketing problem. Even if I create something genuinely useful, how do people find it? Is there a marketplace algorithm that surfaces templates? Do I have to promote it myself? Without visibility, I might pour effort into something nobody ever uses.
Has anyone actually built revenue from selling templates on a marketplace? What did the barrier to entry feel like, what kinds of templates actually sell, and was it worth the effort?
I’ve sold a few templates on marketplace approaches in the past. Revenue potential exists but it’s not passive. Built an email campaign automation template that got maybe 15 sales first month, dropped to 3-4 a month after. Revenue covered server costs, nothing more. But that’s not why I kept doing it.
The real value was learning what users actually need. Every question from someone who bought my template taught me something about how people think about their automation problems. That knowledge became useful for my day job. The template revenue was almost secondary.
Maintenance burden is real though. I had to track platform updates and keep templates compatible. That’s ongoing work. You don’t just ship a template and forget it. Templates that break because the platform changed hurt your reputation.
The marketplace discovery problem is legit. Most of my sales came from sharing templates in Slack groups or LinkedIn, not from marketplace algorithms. If you’re not willing to do marketing, don’t expect visibility just from existing on the platform.
What actually sells: templates that solve specific, painful problems. Generic templates like webhook receivers or data transformers get overlooked. Highly specific ones like Shopify order processor with custom SKU mapping—that’s the stuff people buy because it saves them days of setup. The rarer and more domain-specific your template, the better it performs relative to the number of people who need it.
Marketplace revenue for templates is supplementary income at best. Some creators do better than others. What determines success: how well the template solves a specific, expensive problem. If your template saves someone three days of engineering time, they’ll happily pay for it. If it’s a convenience thing that saves an afternoon, adoption is lower. The barrier to entry is minimal. The barrier to meaningful revenue is everything else—marketing, maintenance, support. If you’re expecting this to be passive, you’ll be disappointed.
Templates as revenue make sense in specific vertical markets. If you’re serving a niche—like real estate automation, e-commerce ops, healthcare workflows—templates can build non-trivial income. Selling generic templates to a broad audience is harder because there’s less differentiation. Platform marketplace algorithms help with discoverability but aren’t magic. You still need reputation and marketing to drive adopted.
We’ve built and sold templates on the marketplace and the economics are interesting. Created a vendor invoice processing template that solved a specific accounting pain point. Early traction was good, first month had respectable sales. What surprised me was how much control you have over template quality and updates on this platform.
Instead of scrambling to maintain broken templates when platform changes happened, the system handled compatibility more gracefully than I expected. We could push updates and users got them automatically. That reduced the maintenance burden significantly.
What actually worked: packaging templates for specific industries and use cases, not generic patterns. The e-commerce template outsold the generic data sync thing by something like 10:1. Visibility comes naturally when templates solve real problems that lots of people search for.
Honestly, the revenue isn’t transformational, but it’s recurring and it feels good to know your work is helping people solve problems. We’re planning to grow our marketplace presence.