Envato was founded in 2006 in a garage by Collis and Cyan Ta’eed and Jun Rung. Their story began after they created a marketplace to sell Adobe Flash player-compatible products. From there, they began building marketplaces, such as ThemeForest, AudioJungle, GraphicRiver, CodeCanyon, PhotoDune, and more, to help people sell their products to niche audiences.
What is Envato?
Envato is a conglomerate of marketplaces that sell everything from themes to graphics. The platform operates on a buy-as-you-go model. Each website under their umbrella serves a different niche audience. Customers can buy assets under different license agreements depending on their intended use. Their websites allow developers, designers, and creators to make money through their marketplace. Their platforms serve over two million customers across all assets.
How does Envato work?
Envato works through an application process. Unfortunately, as of March 2026, they are currently not accepting applications to sell your assets on any of their platforms. The application process is currently on pause.
Once you’re accepted on the platform, you can upload your products to start selling.
What you need to know about selling on Envato
The application window isn’t currently open, so it’s not possible to join as a seller on Envato right now. You will need to keep checking until something opens up, or find an alternative that allows you to sell not only on a marketplace but also on your own website. If you were excited about starting your journey as an Envato seller, the pause of their applications is a bit disappointing.
Envato currently charges a 55% author fee to non-exclusive sellers. If you hope to sell on other marketplaces, this can seem like a large percentage of your revenue, as it’s more than half. Should you decide to be an exclusive seller, you’ll give up earning potential from other platforms while still forking up between 12.5% to 37.5% of your earnings from the platform. To reduce your seller fees, you need to increase your sales volume, which means you’ll likely have to market your assets. Typically, that’s a marketplace’s job.
Envato’s marketplace serves over 2 million buyers and 81,000 sellers. The competition on the platform will be high. Since each marketplace is based on a niche, you’ll be competing against a lot of other sellers in the same space. For example, if you’re selling on ThemeForest, all other sellers on the platform will also be selling themes, which drives up the competition. It’ll be hard to separate yourself from the competition.
Another challenge with selling on Envato is that you can’t sell AI-generated content. For example, if you were hoping to upload AI-generated photos to Photo Dune, your account would be taken down. Even for themes on ThemeForest, you won’t be able to upload AI-generated code that helped you build the product. Envato has a strict no-AI-generated-content policy. Considering most people are using AI these days, this can set sellers back in their efforts to increase efficiency in product creation for the platform.
Lastly, Envato also has a subscription-based model for buyers. Unfortunately, this can mean a smaller cut of the sale. For example, their $16.50 monthly subscription allows unlimited downloads for over 27 million assets. If people can download unlimited assets, the cut per seller would likely be much lower, since they’d only be splitting $16.50. Most people won’t buy just one item with their subscription when it’s billed as unlimited downloads.
Is Envato the best platform to sell products?
No, Envato isn’t the best platform to sell products. They currently aren’t accepting new sellers on their platform, so sellers need to find an Envato alternative, such as Payhip. Payhip has a marketplace where you can sell digital products, including themes, software, photos, videos, graphics, and more. On top of that, you can also create your own website on the platform to build brand recognition for what you sell. To start selling your digital products, sign up for Payhip today.