How to sell Notion templates and reach your first K

In February 2023, Thomas Frank posted his books. Not a vague flex, an actual line-item breakdown: $1,000,508 in Notion template sales for the calendar year 2022. Ultimate Brain did $760,000. The Creator’s Companion bundle did $298,000. The Ultimate Tasks edition did $86,000, and the base edition did $17,000. He published the numbers on X, and the whole thread is still up.

Then he mentioned the part everybody skipped. He hadn’t published a video to his main YouTube channel, the one with millions of subscribers, in nearly a year. The template money came from a much smaller, nerdier channel about Notion specifically. His words: more views does not equal more money.

Most people read a thread like that and go build a giant all-in-one life dashboard. That’s the mistake. The templates that print money in 2026 solve one annoying problem for one specific person, and the market for generic “second brain” systems is a graveyard.

Selling Notion templates means building a reusable Notion page, publishing it as a duplicable template, listing it on a storefront like the Notion Marketplace, Gumroad, or Payhip, and driving traffic to it through search, short-form video, or an email list. Top sellers clear $10,000 a month or more. Most sellers who stick with it land somewhere between $500 and $3,000.

Last updated: July 2026

Quick answers

How much can you make selling Notion templates?

Realistic earnings run from $0 to about $3,000 a month for most sellers who build consistently for six to twelve months. The ceiling is much higher: Thomas Frank reported $1,000,508 in template revenue for 2022, and Easlo has publicly cited figures above $500,000 a year. The median seller with one template and no distribution makes close to nothing.

Where do you sell Notion templates?

The four main storefronts are the Notion Marketplace (10% plus 40 cents per sale), Gumroad (10% plus 50 cents), Payhip (5% on the free plan), and Etsy (6.5% transaction fee plus a $0.20 listing fee). Most sellers list on Notion’s Marketplace for discovery and run checkout through Gumroad or Payhip to keep more margin.

Do you need an audience to sell Notion templates?

No, but you need distribution, which is not the same thing. The Notion Marketplace, Pinterest, and TikTok all send buyers to creators with zero followers. What you can’t do is publish a template, share it once, and expect sales. Something has to send people to the listing every week.

How much can you make selling Notion templates?

Most sellers make between $500 and $3,000 a month once they have a working product and one reliable traffic source. The million-dollar stories are real, but they sit on top of years of audience-building that the screenshots never show.

Frank’s 2022 numbers are the cleanest public data we have, because he published the full breakdown himself rather than teasing a round number. Two products. $1,000,508. He’d been making content since 2010 and had a team of eight people by the time that year closed. Business Insider covered the milestone, and the coverage itself became another traffic source.

Easlo, the Notion creator otherwise known as Jason Chin, is the second data point people cite. He reported $239,000 from template sales in 2022 and has since been credited with annual figures north of $500,000. He started as a student. He priced low, sold volume, and raised prices as his reputation grew.

Now the unglamorous middle. A creator with one decent template, a Gumroad page, and a few TikToks will typically see a handful of sales in month one and then flat-line. That isn’t a broken business. It’s a distribution problem, and it’s the same problem every micro SaaS founder runs into when they ship without an audience.

The honest math: at a $29 price point on Payhip’s 5% plan, you keep roughly $26.55 after fees and processing. Getting to $1,000 a month means about 38 sales a month, or roughly one and a half sales a day. That’s an achievable number. It’s also a number that requires several hundred people finding your listing every week.

One more variable specific to 2026: Notion now ships AI agents and AI meeting notes inside the product, which raises the floor on what a template has to do to be worth paying for. A page of empty databases isn’t a product anymore. The templates still selling are the ones with opinionated structure, prefilled examples, and documentation that teaches the buyer a workflow, not just a layout. That’s the same quality bar showing up across every category on our list of businesses worth starting in 2026.

What Notion templates sell best?

Single-problem templates outsell all-in-one systems, and the price data backs it up. Easlo’s $20 bullet journal and $40 finance tracker together accounted for close to half his template business, not the $130 Second Brain flagship everyone talks about.

The reason is buyer psychology. Nobody wakes up wanting to “restructure their life in Notion.” They wake up unable to find last month’s invoices, or staring at a content calendar spread across three apps. A template that fixes exactly that gets bought in under two minutes. A template that promises to reorganize their entire existence gets bookmarked and forgotten.

Categories that consistently move:

• Freelancer operations. Invoice tracker, client CRM, project pipeline. Buyers here have revenue and expense budgets.
• Creator workflow. Content calendar, video script pipeline, sponsorship tracker. Frank’s Creator’s Companion is the proof of concept.
• Finance. Budget dashboards, subscription audits, net worth trackers. High volume, low price, high refund tolerance.
• Niche professional systems. Templates for therapists, real estate agents, PhD students, wedding planners. Small audiences, almost no competition, higher prices.
• ADHD and executive-function tools. Habit trackers and low-friction task systems built for people who bounce off traditional productivity apps.

The pattern is narrowness. “Second brain” competes with thousands of listings. “Invoice and client tracker for freelance video editors” competes with maybe nine.

Here’s a test that costs nothing. Search your template idea inside the Notion Marketplace. If the first screen fills with near-identical listings, you’re building into a commodity and your only lever will be price. If you get four results and two of them look abandoned, you’ve found a niche. Template demand tracks the same curve as every other digital product in the current side hustle cycle: the crowded categories pay in pennies, the boring specific ones pay in dollars.

One more thing the top sellers do: they bundle. Frank’s Creator’s Companion and Ultimate Brain bundle outsold his individual editions by a 3:1 ratio and pushed average order value up. Build three related templates in one niche, sell them separately at $19 to $29, then sell the set at $49. The bundle becomes the default choice.

Where to sell Notion templates

The Notion Marketplace gives you discovery but takes 10% plus 40 cents and makes you wait through an approval queue. Gumroad and Payhip give you instant control but zero built-in traffic. Most serious sellers use both.

Here’s what each platform actually costs, before payment processing where noted:

Frank’s own recommendation for beginners, in that same thread, was Lemon Squeezy, and he specifically noted it charges roughly half of what Gumroad does. He runs it himself.

The practical setup most sellers land on: list on the Notion Marketplace for discovery, but point the paid listing at a third-party checkout if you want the lower fee. Notion explicitly supports linking to outside payment sites. Be careful with one detail though, covered further down, because Notion’s own docs warn that onboarding to Stripe changes how your existing template links behave.

How to price a Notion template

Price by problem size, not by how many databases you crammed in. A tracker that saves someone an hour a month belongs at $9 to $19. A full operating system with documentation and video walkthroughs belongs at $79 and up, which is exactly where Ultimate Brain sits.

Working bands as of 2026:

• $9 to $19: single-purpose trackers. Habit, budget, reading log, workout. Volume plays.
• $19 to $49: professional systems. Freelance CRM, content calendar, client portal. This is the sweet spot for most first products.
• $49 to $79: multi-template bundles and business systems with onboarding docs.
• $79 to $130: flagship systems with video tutorials, support, and lifetime updates. Ultimate Brain and Easlo’s $130 Second Brain live here.

Do the fee math before you set the number. On a $19 sale through Notion’s Marketplace, the 10% plus 40 cent structure takes $2.30, leaving $16.70. On the same $19 sale, Gumroad’s 10% plus 50 cents takes $2.40. Those gaps look trivial until you’re doing 400 sales a month, at which point the difference between a 5% platform and a 10% platform is roughly $380 a month of pure margin.

Don’t launch at $5. Cheap templates attract refund-happy buyers and signal low quality, and the support burden per customer is identical whether they paid $5 or $50. Price at $19 minimum and put a free lite version out as the funnel instead.

Do you need an audience to sell Notion templates?

You don’t need followers, but you do need a traffic engine, and it has to run every week. Frank’s own data makes the point better than any guru thread: he doubled his revenue by going all-in on a small niche channel while his 2.9-million-subscriber flagship channel sat idle.

That’s the real lesson buried in the million-dollar screenshot. Audience size is a vanity metric. Audience relevance is the business.

The distribution channels that work in 2026, ranked by how fast they pay:

1. Notion Marketplace search. The only channel where the buyer is already inside the product with intent. Slow to get approved, best conversion once you’re in.
2. Pinterest. Template screenshots are visual search bait, and pins have a shelf life measured in months, not hours.
3. TikTok and Reels. Screen recordings of the template solving a problem. Short, ugly, effective. Same playbook that works for UGC creators.
4. SEO. Write the tutorial your template automates. Frank spent years on this and it’s still his moat.
5. Email. Free lite template in exchange for an address, paid version in the follow-up sequence.

Pick two. Not five. A creator posting three template demos a week to TikTok and pinning every screenshot to Pinterest will out-earn one publishing everywhere inconsistently.

The 30-day path to your first sale

Your first sale is a 30-day project if you skip the part where you spend three months building a perfect system nobody asked for. Build small, ship ugly, fix it after money changes hands.

Days 1 to 3: pick the problem. Not the template, the problem. Go to a subreddit or Discord for one profession and read complaints about spreadsheets. When someone says “I’ve been tracking this in a messy Google Sheet for two years,” you have a product.

Days 4 to 10: build the smallest version. One database, two views, one dashboard page. If it takes more than a week you’re overbuilding. The template that made Easlo real money was a bullet journal.

Days 11 to 14: make it duplicable. In Notion, hit Share, open the Publish tab, publish the page, then toggle on “Duplicate as template.” Test it in a second workspace. Broken links inside a duplicated template are the number one refund cause.

Days 15 to 18: build the listing. Five clean screenshots, a 60-second demo video, and a description that names the buyer in the first line. Notion allows videos up to 60 seconds on Marketplace listings. Use every second.

Days 19 to 30: distribute relentlessly. One demo video a day for the first two weeks. Pin every screenshot. Answer every “how do you track this?” question in your niche’s community with a genuine answer plus a link.

Realistic timeline to $1,000 in cumulative revenue: three to six months for someone posting consistently. Three to six weeks for someone who already has a relevant audience. Never, for someone who builds and waits. This is the same brutal filter that decides which side hustles actually turn into income and which stay hobbies.

The fine print nobody blogs about

Notion’s refund policy can claw money back out of your Stripe balance, and if your balance is empty, Notion reserves the right to debit your bank account. That sentence is in Notion’s own seller documentation, and almost none of the “passive income” guides mention it.

The specifics, straight from the source:

• Approval takes months. Notion says selling directly on Marketplace requires joining a waitlist, and that review “may take a few months.” Plan a third-party checkout while you wait.
• 14-day refunds, with teeth. Buyers can refund within 14 days of purchase. When they do, every copy of your content in their workspace gets removed, including their own edits and additions. The refund amount comes out of your Stripe account.
• Funds are held 14 days. Money isn’t payout-eligible until it clears the refund window. Payouts run biweekly on Thursdays at 9am Pacific, with a $20 minimum balance.
• Non-US sellers pay an extra 1%. A foreign exchange fee applies on top of the 10% plus 40 cents when converting payouts from USD.
• Stripe onboarding rewires your links. Once you onboard for Marketplace payments, your existing paid templates redirect to Marketplace checkout. If you also sell on Gumroad, Notion tells you to duplicate the template and publish it at a new site link, or your third-party buyers won’t be able to duplicate what they paid for.

None of this makes the business bad. It makes it a business rather than passive income. The templates keep selling while you sleep. The support tickets, the refund clawbacks, the broken duplication links after you update a database schema, those don’t sleep either.

Build one narrow template. Price it at $19 or more. Ship it to a real niche and post about it every week for a quarter. That’s the whole playbook, and it’s the same discipline behind every durable AI side hustle and online income stream we’ve tracked. Selling Notion templates rewards narrowness and consistency, and punishes ambition without distribution.