I keep seeing mentions of an automation marketplace where people can publish their own workflow templates and sell them. On one hand, it sounds like a solid side income opportunity—you build something useful, package it, other people pay for it. On the other hand, I have no idea if there’s actual demand or if it’s just saturation with templates nobody buys.
I’ve built a few automations that could probably work for other people. They solve real problems—integrations I spent time on, transformations that could apply to similar workflows. But before I spend time packaging and publishing one, I want to know: is this worth the effort?
Is there actual demand for custom automation templates, or have the ones already on the marketplace basically captured the available demand? How many people are actually making meaningful money from this, and what kind of templates tend to sell?
Also, if you’ve bought templates on a marketplace, how much work is it to adapt them to your specific setup versus just building from scratch?
The marketplace is actually more active than you’d think, especially for niche solutions. What sells are templates that solve specific, slightly painful problems—not the obvious ones like basic Slack integrations that everyone can build themselves.
Think about it from the buyer’s perspective. If you’re an agency without someone who knows automation well, paying for a pre-built template that handles your industry’s specific workflow is worth it. If you’re a small SaaS company needing a custom integration you don’t have dev capacity for, buying a template is cheaper than building.
I published a template for a specific type of data enrichment workflow that solved a problem I’d built multiple times for clients. Started selling within weeks. Revenue is modest—not a full income—but consistent. Couple hundred bucks a month. The real value is that it runs on its own; you build it once and people keep buying it.
The templates that don’t sell are the generic ones that people could build themselves faster. The ones that win are either highly specific to an industry or they handle something complex enough that building it would be time-consuming.
I’ve bought a couple templates, and honestly, the value depends entirely on how close they are to your actual needs. One I bought handled most of what I needed; I customized like 20% of it and was done. Another one required so much rework that I just built from scratch instead.
From a selling perspective, I think there’s demand for templates that are specific enough to be valuable but flexible enough to adapt without major rewriting. The problem is that most templates are either too generic (why buy it if you can build it?) or too specific (can’t adapt it without starting over).
If you’ve got a workflow that solves a real pain point and it’s flexible enough that people could customize the critical parts without rebuilding it entirely, it’s worth publishing. But you need to be realistic about volume. It’s not going to make you rich, but it can be passive income if the product is solid.
The marketplace phenomenon is interesting because demand exists but it’s not uniform. People buy templates when the alternative is spending significant time learning a tool and building something they don’t have expertise in. If you’re an agency or small business trying to offer automation to clients without hiring specialists, templates are valuable.
But for individual contributors or teams with automation experience, building usually makes more sense because you can customize freely. So the demand curve skews toward businesses that need solutions fast and have budgets but not expertise.
For publishing, this means your template has better market fit if it solves a specific business problem rather than a generic technical one. “Marketing lead enrichment automation” sells better than “API data transformer.”
Marketplace dynamics favor templates that reduce implementation friction for a specific use case. Generic templates compete with the builder’s own ease of use. Specific templates compete with the cost of hiring someone to build them.
Demand exists in that second category. Small businesses and non-technical teams have adoption barriers that pre-built, maturenautomations address. Publishing templates makes sense if you’re solving a problem expensive enough that people pay, but common enough that you’ll get repeat buyers.
Revenue potential is supplement-level, not primary income. But it’s defensible if the template is solving a real business problem, not just a technical one.