Small Studio Stack

How to Start Selling Figma Templates: The Small Studio Tool Stack

By reo ยท Updated

You already have the hard part: you can design. Somewhere on your drive there’s a UI kit, a set of landing page sections or a dashboard you built for a client and rebuilt three times since. Turning that into a product is mostly a question of tools, and the choices look more complicated than they are.

A template business needs three things: a tool to design and maintain the file, a place that takes payment and delivers the download, and a way to reach buyers again when you release the next one. This guide walks through each, with prices and the catch for every option.

A note on how this guide is written: the design tools below are ones we use day to day. We haven’t sold templates ourselves yet, so the selling and email sections are the research we’d want before opening a shop, based on each company’s official pricing and help pages and checked on the date at the top.

Step 1: Design and maintain the file

Figma

Figma is still what most buyers expect. If you sell a “Figma template,” buyers will open it in Figma, so you need to build and test it there even if you design elsewhere.

Cost: the free Starter plan allows one team, one folder and 3 files, which is tight once you have a few products. Professional is $16 per month billed annually ($20 monthly).

The catch: you’ll want Professional before long, and that cost is per editor.

Penpot

Penpot is a free, open-source alternative. It suits templates aimed at developers, because its layout is built on real CSS Flexbox and Grid, and its Inspect panel outputs CSS and HTML.

Cost: free for up to 8 people on the hosted plan.

The catch: Penpot files aren’t Figma files. If your buyers expect .fig, a Penpot version is an extra product, not a replacement. For a fuller comparison, see Penpot vs FigCraft.

Step 2: Choose where to sell

Figma Community: good for free files, closed to new sellers

Figma lets approved creators sell files on Figma Community for a flat 15% fee, and Figma handles sales tax. But at the time of writing, Figma says it is “not approving new creators to sell paid files on Community.” There’s no date for reopening.

Use it for: a free sample or “lite” version that links to your paid product elsewhere.

Gumroad

Gumroad is the simplest way to put a file behind a payment link.

Cost: 10% + $0.50 per sale on direct sales, plus card processing (2.9% + $0.30) on top. Sales through Gumroad’s Discover marketplace cost 30%.

Good to know: Gumroad acts as merchant of record and handles sales tax, including VAT, where it has obligations.

The catch: the total fee on a $20 template is roughly 10% + $0.50 + 2.9% + $0.30, or about $3.38. That’s the price of convenience.

Payhip

Payhip works like Gumroad, with cheaper paid plans once you sell regularly.

Cost: the Free Forever plan charges 5% per sale. The $29/month plan drops that to 2%, and the $99/month plan to 0%.

Good to know: Payhip handles EU and UK VAT on digital products on every plan.

The catch: the monthly plans only pay off at higher volumes. Stay on the free plan until the 5% fee is clearly larger than $29 a month.

Lemon Squeezy

Lemon Squeezy is a merchant of record with a clean checkout and good tools for software and subscriptions.

Cost: 5% + $0.50 per sale, with extra percentages for international payments, PayPal and subscriptions.

The catch: Stripe bought Lemon Squeezy, and in January the company said it is rebuilding around Stripe Managed Payments and admitted to “slower support responses and less frequent product updates.” Signups are open, but check its status before you build your whole shop on it.

Creative Market and Etsy

Marketplaces bring buyers to you, but they take more. Creative Market pays shops 50% of net revenue and requires an application with a portfolio. It also requires that your price there isn’t higher than your lowest price on any other marketplace. Etsy charges $0.20 per listing plus transaction and payment fees, and works best for templates aimed at non-designers.

Step 3: Stay in touch with buyers

Your second template is much easier to sell to people who bought the first one. That needs an email list, and it’s worth starting before you have anything to sell.

MailerLite

MailerLite is the gentlest starting point.

Cost: free for up to 250 subscribers and 2,500 emails a month. The cheapest paid plan, Comfort, is $12/month ($10.80/month billed yearly) for up to 500 subscribers.

Good to know: you can sell digital products directly from MailerLite with no MailerLite commission, only Stripe’s processing fee. The free plan allows one product.

The catch: the free plan’s 250-subscriber limit arrives quickly if a free sample does well.

Kit

Kit (formerly ConvertKit) is built around creators who sell to their audience.

Cost: the Free plan covers up to 10,000 subscribers, with unlimited broadcasts and the ability to sell digital products. Paid plans start at $39/month ($33/month billed yearly) for 1,000 subscribers.

Good to know: selling through Kit costs 3.5% + $0.30 per sale in US dollars, according to its help center.

The catch: the first paid plan costs $39 a month, more than three times MailerLite’s cheapest plan, so the upgrade is a bigger step.

Step 4 (later): courses

If buyers keep asking how you built your system, a short course can follow. Thinkific no longer has a free plan, offering a 30-day trial instead, and starts at $109/month ($82/month billed yearly). Kajabi starts at $179/month ($143/month billed yearly) with a 14-day trial. Neither makes sense until templates are already selling.

Which one should you pick?

Try the free plan first

Every tool in the first three steps has a free way in. Publish one free sample, one paid template and one email signup form before you pay for anything. The numbers from that first month will tell you which upgrade, if any, is worth it.