How much people make selling Notion templates: $520 median

Most people who sell Notion templates make very little from any one template. The only data-based estimate we found puts the median fixed-price Notion template on Gumroad at about $520 in lifetime revenue. In that sample, 49% of templates made under $500 and the top 10% made $7,560 or more. Only 2 of 365 passed $100,000. Spread over the hours it takes to build and sell a template, the median comes to single-digit dollars an hour after fees and tax.

The numbers

Inputs: $520 median lifetime revenue (InsightRaider, 2026), Gumroad direct fee of 10% + $0.50 (Gumroad pricing) and 15.3% self-employment tax (IRS). The $20 price, 40 hours and 10% income tax are our assumptions. Rounded to the cent, so costs plus net come to $13.01.

Assumptions

Swap in your own figures. The arithmetic below works the same way.

1. Revenue: $520 lifetime. This is InsightRaider’s median for 365 fixed-price USD templates on Gumroad that show a public sales counter. It is a lifetime total over an unknown period, not a monthly figure, and it ignores refunds and discounts.
2. Price: $20. The research gives no median price, so we assume a round $20. That means 26 sales ($520 ÷ $20).
3. Platform: Gumroad, direct links only, at 10% + $0.50 per sale. We assume no sales come through Gumroad’s Discover marketplace, which takes 30%. Any separate card processing charge is not included.
4. Hours: 40 in total, covering the build, the preview images, the listing, promotion and answering buyers over the template’s life.
5. Other costs: $0. No ads, no design software, no refunds. We assume you already own the computer and the internet connection.
6. Tax: 25.3% set aside. That is 15.3% self-employment tax on the full net, plus an assumed 10% for federal income tax. Half of SE tax is deductible, so this set-aside is on the cautious side. Your bracket and state will differ.

Worked example: the median template, line by line

Lifetime revenue (median)             $520.00
Sales at $20 each                     $520 / $20 = 26 sales
Gumroad percentage fee                10% x $520.00 = $52.00
Gumroad per-sale fee                  26 x $0.50 = $13.00
Total fees                            $52.00 + $13.00 = $65.00
Net before tax                        $520.00 - $65.00 = $455.00
Self-employment tax (15.3%)           $455.00 x 0.153 = $69.62
Income tax set-aside (10%, assumed)   $455.00 x 0.10 = $45.50
Net after tax                         $455.00 - $69.62 - $45.50 = $339.88

Divided by 40 hours:

Gross     $520.00 / 40 = $13.00 an hour
Costs     $65.00 / 40  = $1.63 an hour
Net       $455.00 / 40 = $11.38 an hour
After tax $339.88 / 40 = $8.50 an hour

If all $455 landed in one tax year, it would clear the $400 of net self-employment earnings at which the IRS requires Schedule SE. Spread evenly over two years it would not, unless you have other self-employment income.

Where the median sits in the full spread

InsightRaider is a Gumroad analytics company. It counted the active Gumroad listings with “Notion” in the name, then estimated revenue by multiplying each list price by its public sales count.

The source lists its own caveats, and all of them point the same way:

• The figures are estimates from public counters, not figures sellers reported or had audited.
• Sellers with sales are more likely to show a counter, so the page says “the true median is probably lower.”
• The totals are lifetime figures and “cannot be read as monthly revenue.”
• InsightRaider sells a $49-a-month subscription, so it has a commercial interest in the topic.

Notion publishes no earnings figures. Its “Become a creator” page offers “some money on the side” and nothing more specific. No source in our research reports what share of sellers make zero sales.

The outlier everyone quotes

Thomas Frank’s numbers sit at the far right of the chart, and they are his own figures. He reported about $1 million in Notion template sales from January to December 2022:

In a Starter Story interview published in December 2023, he said the two templates had done “$2.1 million in sales” in about two years, and that template sales averaged “around $120k/mo.” Three adjustments apply before comparing yourself with that:

• It is revenue, not profit. He described “massive margins”. He also said the business had its first unprofitable months while it spent about $22,000 a month building a software product, Flylighter.
• It is a team. The profile lists one founder and three employees, and the text names an ops director and a developer.
• He had a channel to sell through. His other income, about $15,000 a month, came mostly from affiliate deals and YouTube AdSense.

Ultimate Brain’s estimated $1.9M on Gumroad is about 3,650 times the median ($1,900,000 ÷ $520). Easlo, the other name that comes up often, follows the same pattern of a large following. A secondhand profile describes “tens of thousands of customers,” prices of $10 to $100 and 1.1M+ followers across platforms. We found no primary source for Easlo’s revenue.

Fees by price, and what to charge

Price signals in the research:

• 46% of Gumroad Notion listings are free or pay-what-you-want.
• SendOwl quotes $7 to $99 for paid templates, without giving a data source.
• Easlo’s templates are described as $10 to $100.
• Ultimate Brain was $129 in the March 2026 archive InsightRaider used.

The fixed per-sale fee makes cheap templates expensive to sell. The table compares the fee share on Notion’s own Marketplace (8% + $0.40, per Notion’s help page) and on Gumroad direct (10% + $0.50):

The last column is $1,000 divided by what a US seller keeps per sale, rounded up to a whole sale. At our $20 assumption, the median template sold 26 copies, which is under half of the 56 Notion sales needed to net $1,000. Below about $10, fees take a noticeably bigger cut. Above that, the number of buyers moves the result far more than the fee.

What each platform keeps on a $20 sale

The Etsy figure is a 6.5% transaction fee ($1.30), plus US payment processing of 3% + $0.25 ($0.85), plus a $0.20 listing fee. A listing lasts four months or until the item sells, so we count the $0.20 against each sale. The full Etsy fee picture is in our breakdown of what Etsy fees add up to per sale. Many guides still quote Notion at a flat 10%, but its current help page says 8% + $0.40.

Notion’s payout rules affect cash flow. Payouts run every two weeks on Thursdays at 9am Pacific, funds are held 14 days, and the minimum balance is $20. One $20 sale leaves you $18, which is below the minimum, so your first payout needs at least two sales.

Payhip’s paid plans only make sense at volume:

Plus ($29/mo, 2%) beats Free (5%) when    0.03 x monthly sales > $29  ->  above $966.67/mo
Pro ($99/mo, 0%) beats Free (5%) when     0.05 x monthly sales > $99  ->  above $1,980/mo
Pro beats Plus when                       0.02 x monthly sales > $70  ->  above $3,500/mo

The median template’s whole lifetime total, $520, is below the monthly break-even for Plus.

For a US seller at $20, Notion’s Marketplace has the lowest all-in fee we could confirm. Lemon Squeezy is lower on paper, but its future is unclear. Stripe Managed Payments and Payhip depend on processing fees we did not confirm. You can’t list on Notion straight away (see the rules below). In the meantime, direct links on Gumroad cost $0.50 more per $20 sale, and Gumroad has been the merchant of record since 1 January 2025.

What changes the answer

Each row changes one thing from the base case and keeps the 25.3% tax set-aside.

• Hours and sales volume decide the result. Price and platform move it by cents.
• A template that keeps selling with no extra work earns more per hour each month. One that stalls never earns back the build time.
• Costs left out of the base case pull the figures down: ads, design tools, refunds and support time.
• The top-10% row probably overstates take-home pay, because 10% income tax is likely too low at that income.

How crowded the market is

Gumroad alone has 3,648 active listings with “Notion” in the name, and almost half are free. Notion’s own Marketplace has a waitlist. The money is concentrated: 31 templates in the sample passed $10,000, while 179 stayed under $500. The numbers describe a long tail: crowded at the bottom, with room at the top for a few sellers.

Lists of “best-selling categories” don’t change this. SendOwl names productivity, personal finance, content calendars and simple CRMs, but gives no data source. Kupkaike looked at 400+ Etsy and Gumroad listings and found life-admin, job-specific and ADHD templates in the lead, but it measured review counts and bestseller badges, not sales. Notion’s “Top 10 Paid Sales Templates” page covers templates for sales teams and is not a best-seller list. No platform publishes cross-platform sales data. Reddit threads are individual reports, both the wins and the “made nothing” posts. The 365-template sample is the closest thing to real data, and it leans toward sellers who have made sales.

Rules that cost time or money

• Notion waitlist: you apply and wait. Notion says review “may take a few months” and that it approves or rejects at its discretion.
• Age: Notion requires you to be 18 or older for paid templates and 16 or older for free ones.
• Listing terms: paid Notion listings are priced in USD only and can’t be used to send buyers away from the Marketplace. You must give buyers “ongoing commercially reasonable support.” Notion can remove a listing “at any time and without notice.”
• Refunds: buyers can ask for a refund within 14 days, and the template is then removed from their workspace. Refunds come out of your Stripe account, and Notion may charge extra fees for refunds or chargebacks. If you are buying, the 14-day window is your protection against a resold or broken template.
• Copies and resell-rights packs: Notion bans reposting work bought from other creators. Etsy requires digital items to be made or designed by the seller, which rules out resell-rights (PLR) template packs.
• Lemon Squeezy: on 28 January 2026 its CEO said support was slower and updates fewer while the team builds Stripe Managed Payments. He promised existing users an easy migration and gave no shutdown date.

Tax on template income

This is arithmetic, not tax advice. A tax professional can tell you what applies to you.

• 1099-K: platforms only have to file one when your payments are over $20,000 and over 200 transactions. The median seller will not get one.
• No form still means tax: the IRS says all income must be reported, even when no 1099-K arrives, and it lists selling goods online as gig work.
• Self-employment tax: 15.3%. You file Schedule SE once net self-employment earnings reach $400, and half of the SE tax is deductible.
• Sales tax and income tax are separate. Notion, Gumroad and Lemon Squeezy act as merchant of record and handle sales tax and VAT on each sale. Income tax is still yours to report and pay. Payhip only handles EU VAT and UK tax by default, and you set up any other tax regions yourself.

Compared with

The $8.50 is after tax, so take tax off any hourly wage before you compare the two. Timing is the bigger difference. Hourly work pays for hours already worked. A template is an upfront bet on 40 hours, and the sample suggests the typical return is small. To compare with gig work you can do on the side, see our ranking of side hustles by after-tax pay per hour and what side hustles pay people with full-time jobs.

The numbers favor sellers who already have followers to sell to. They also favor people who treat a first template as a cheap experiment and count every hour they put in.

Verdict in one number

$8.50 an hour. That is the estimated after-tax return on 40 hours of work for the median Gumroad Notion template, and the data source itself says the true median is probably lower.

Sources

• Notion: Sell templates on Marketplace
• Notion: Marketplace guidelines and terms
• Gumroad pricing
• InsightRaider: Notion template revenue on Gumroad
• Thomas Frank: $1M in Notion template sales
• Starter Story: Thomas Frank interview
• Etsy Help: fees
• Lemon Squeezy pricing and 2026 update
• Stripe: Managed Payments pricing
• Payhip pricing
• IRS: Form 1099-K threshold FAQs
• IRS: Gig economy tax center
• IRS: Self-employment tax