Notion templates, printable planners and Canva kits: What digital products actually sell in 2026, and the fee maths on Gumroad, Etsy and your own site
On 5 August 2026 Etsy reported a take rate of 25.9% for the second quarter. That is the share of every pound spent on the marketplace that Etsy keeps as revenue, up from 24.2% across the whole of 2025 according to the company's full-year results published on 19 February 2026. For a professional weighing up whether to sell a Notion template, a printable planner or a Canva kit, that single number is the most useful thing Etsy has published all year.
The digital product path is attractive for a reason. There is no stock, no postage, no returns and no cost of goods once the file exists. The catch is that the platforms know this too, and they price accordingly. This post sets out what actually sells in 2026, the price bands buyers accept, and the fee maths on Gumroad, Etsy and your own site for a £25 product, worked through to 100 sales a month.
Every figure below is from a named source and dated. Where a number is a platform's own marketing claim or a third-party estimate, it says so. Where sources disagree, both are given.
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What is actually selling in 2026
Etsy does not publish a league table of digital categories, so the best available picture comes from the seller trade press and the platform's own trend commentary. Trade guides from Outfy and Insight Agent, both updated in early 2026, list the same five categories at the top: printable planners, editable Canva templates for social media and small business, printable wall art, wedding invitation suites, and educational worksheets. Insight Agent's own disclaimer says its rankings rest on public listing data and seller interviews as of February 2026, so treat the order as indicative rather than measured.
The platform's own commentary points the other way for anything generic. In Etsy's spring and summer 2026 trend report, published on 17 March 2026 and covered by Stylist, trend expert Dayna Isom Johnson said shoppers are "stepping away from AI-overload" towards what feels personal and made with intention. Searches for memory journals were up 189% and traveller journal searches had doubled. The signal is that specific, well-made and clearly human products are gaining ground while the mass-produced template layer is not.
Notion templates sit outside Etsy's data but follow the same pattern. Guides from Kupkaike and SendOwl, both dated 2026, report that most paid templates sell in the £5 to £49 range, with entry systems such as a habit tracker or budget board at £19 to £39, business and client systems at £29 to £79, and flagship bundles above that. Those are trade figures, not Notion's. The one number with a hard source is the ceiling: Business Insider verified in 2022 that creator Thomas Frank had passed £1,000,508 in template revenue from two products priced between £49 and £179. He also had a large YouTube audience, which is the part the template guides tend to leave out.
The digital product market in numbers
Two cautions on the big numbers. The Goldman Sachs figure is a 2023 projection driven mostly by influencer marketing and platform advertising, not template sales, and the Statista figure includes universities and corporate training. They tell you the pond is large, which is true, and crowded, which is also true.
The fees, platform by platform
Gumroad's pricing page, checked on 19 September 2026, states 10% plus £0.50 on every sale made through your own links or profile, and 30% on sales where a new buyer finds you through its Discover marketplace. The page says in terms that Gumroad does not charge a monthly fee. Card processing is not included in the 10%: seller guides from Checkout Page and Swell, both updated in 2026, put it at roughly 2.9% plus £0.30 on top, and Gumroad keeps its fee on refunds.
Etsy charges three fees on every digital sale, plus one that applies only in the UK. The listing fee is 20 US cents, roughly £0.16 at 2026 exchange rates, charged when a listing is created and again each time it sells. The transaction fee is 6.5% of the order total, a rate unchanged since April 2022 according to Craftybase's 2026 fee guide. Payment processing for UK sellers is 4% plus £0.20 per order; the 3% plus fixed amount that appears in many guides is the US rate. On 23 April 2026 ChannelX reported that Etsy's UK Regulatory Operating Fee would rise from 0.32% to 0.48% of the order total from 22 June 2026. Etsy also adds 20% VAT to its fees for sellers who are not VAT registered, and Offsite Ads take a further 12% or 15% of any sale attributed to them, compulsory once a shop passes £10,000 in twelve-month sales.
A self-hosted store swaps platform commission for a payment processor and a fixed monthly cost. Stripe's UK pricing page, checked on 19 September 2026, lists 1.5% plus 20p for standard UK cards, 2.8% plus 20p for premium UK cards, 2.5% plus 20p for European cards and 3.15% plus 20p for international cards, with 2% added where currency conversion applies. If you do not want to run your own checkout, Payhip's free plan charges 5% per sale with processing on top, and Notion's own Marketplace charges 8% plus £0.40 per transaction according to its help centre, with a further 1% for non-US payouts.
| £25 product, one sale | Gumroad (direct link) | Etsy UK (no ads, not VAT registered) | Own site, Stripe UK card |
|---|---|---|---|
| Platform fee | £2.50 + £0.50 = £3.00 | £1.63 (6.5%) + £0.16 listing + £0.12 (0.48%) = £1.91 | £0 |
| Payment processing | £0.73 + £0.30 = £1.03 | £1.00 + £0.20 = £1.20 | £0.38 + £0.20 = £0.58 |
| VAT on fees | Handled as merchant of record | £0.62 (20% of £3.11) | Nil on Stripe fees |
| Total cost of the sale | £4.03 (16.1%) | £3.73 (14.9%) | £0.58 (2.3%) |
| You keep | £20.97 | £21.27 | £24.42 before hosting |
| If the sale came via ads or Discover | 30% flat: keep £17.50 | Add 15% Offsite Ads: keep £17.52 | Your own ad spend |
The self-hosted column looks like a clear winner until you add what the platforms are charging for. Gumroad acts as merchant of record, calculating and remitting VAT and sales tax in every country it sells into. Etsy brings 87 million buyers. A self-hosted store brings neither, and its subscription is the same whether you sell nothing or a thousand copies. The fee is the price of the traffic and the paperwork, not of the transaction.
Worked example: 100 sales a month at £25
Gross revenue is £2,500. On Gumroad through your own links you keep 100 × £20.97 = £2,097. On Etsy UK with no Offsite Ads and no VAT registration you keep 100 × £21.27 = £2,127. On your own site through Stripe you keep 100 × £24.42 = £2,442, less the store subscription: at a typical £29 a month plan the figure is £2,413, and with a 5% Payhip-style storefront instead of a subscription it is £2,317.
The gap between the cheapest and dearest route is about £300 a month at this volume. If a marketplace sends you even 15 of those 100 buyers you would not otherwise have found, it has paid for itself.
Assumes UK standard cards, the 22 June 2026 Etsy UK regulatory fee, and one listing fee per sale. Sales through Etsy Offsite Ads or Gumroad Discover cut the kept amount to roughly £1,750. None of this is your profit: it is revenue after platform costs, before tax and before the hours spent making the product.
The concentration nobody puts on the sales page
The honest part of the digital product path is the distribution of earnings, and it is steep. InsightRaider, a data firm that crawled 146,271 public Gumroad product pages between January 2024 and May 2026, estimates that the median creator on the platform earns about £72 a month, that fewer than 5% earn more than £1,000 a month, and that 44% of products have never made a sale. These are estimates built from public ratings and prices, not Gumroad's own reporting, and the firm gives a margin of error of 15% to 20%. Gumroad has not published a comparable distribution for 2025 or 2026.
Etsy does not publish per-seller earnings either. Its Q2 2026 letter gives trailing spend per active buyer of £124 a year, and a digital shop competes for a slice of that with more than five million other active shops, according to Etsy's Q1 2026 filing. The five categories at the top of every trade list are there because they are easy to make, which is exactly why they are crowded.
"The product with no marginal cost is the product with no barrier to entry. Your margin is protected by your expertise or it is not protected at all."
This is why the question in which digital product should you build matters more than the platform choice. A generic weekly planner competes with thousands of near-identical files at £4 to £8. A planner built for a specific professional problem you have actually solved, priced at £25 to £49, competes with a handful. The fee maths above is the same in both cases. The number of buyers is not.
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The cheapest way to find out whether your product sits in the crowded layer or the protected one is to sell it before it exists. A pre-sale is a reversible bet: the downside is capped at a refund and an evening's work, and the upside is real information about demand. On your own site a Stripe payment link does the job; on Gumroad a product page can go up before the file does.
Which platform, then
For a first product sold to an audience you already reach, Gumroad's flat 10% plus £0.50 and its handling of VAT is the least administration for the money, and the 30% Discover rate is irrelevant if buyers arrive through your own links. For a product that depends on search traffic from strangers, Etsy's effective 15% for a UK seller is the price of 87 million buyers. A self-hosted store makes sense once your mailing list is large enough that the subscription is a rounding error.
The order matters more than the choice. Validate on the cheapest route, learn the price the market accepts, then move to the platform whose fee buys something you need. The fuller process, from packaging expertise to first sale, is in how to create and sell a digital product. And once the money arrives, remember that the £1,000 trading allowance is measured on gross receipts, not on what you keep after fees, so a hundred sales a month puts you well past it in the first month.
Related reading
Which digital product should you build? A guide for professionals
How to create and sell a digital product: A guide for professionals with expertise
How to make a reversible bet: de-risking your first income experiment
The £1,000 trading allowance explained, and the new £3,000 reporting threshold
This article is general information, not legal, financial or tax advice. Platform fees, exchange rates and tax thresholds change; check the current fee pages of Gumroad, Etsy and Stripe and the guidance on GOV.UK before you rely on any figure here, and take independent advice for your own circumstances.
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