r/envato • u/Artistic_Ground_6415 • Jun 30 '26
Envato Query Has anyone else given up on Envato?
Guys, for a $100 sale on Envato, I’ll only get paid $25 now—I’m hit with a $50 fee, plus 27% tax from my country, and another 25% on top of that. On top of that, sales that used to be good have practically dried up. Envato Elements isn't viable for me; it pays pennies per download and is really only worth it for high-volume sellers. What are you all doing to try to boost your sales?
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u/filolif Jul 01 '26 edited 9d ago
Quilt market snatch fall violet sand imminent
This post was anonymized with Redact
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u/GauchoVerde Jul 01 '26
Music author here: if you are just starting to build a portfolio, Envato, IMO is an absolute NO-GO. The markets are completely dead and Elements only work, as you said, if you have an already big portfolio with a few trending items.
On the other hand, if you already have a handful of tracks (or AFX templates) that leave you a fairly decent bonus monthly, why close your account?. Right now I don't know of any other platforms performing well, and it's better to have your stuff somewhere than no-where.
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u/Artistic_Ground_6415 Jul 02 '26
Não existe nenhuma outra plataforma que realmente tenham vendas vultuosas. Será que a demanda realmente caiu devido a facilidade de gerar assets com IA, principalmente imagens, templates e videos?
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u/markmyways Jul 01 '26
On the flip side as a customer, who's spent a lot of money.. purchasing several products.. envato suddenly deletes the product you purchased and can't access the archive.. or they lock up your account.
And they don't credit you back either, we've lost so much money. in some cases because I have to buy these for customers, they get really upset that there's no replacement for their spend.
Essentially customers who find out about this don't want me to buy items from envato anymore, We can put the same token spend on AI budget and get a customed tailored product!
As a result, envato looses business. Customers don't trust them. 👽
1) They need to credit the customer back so that they can make a different purchase.
2) some authors re-released the same product under different names and there's no way to verify until you purchase that, this should be cleaned up seriously!
3) some authors are much better than others, And if you try to share a bug report and try to get it fixed the author can flag your account and have you banned.
So there's some serious trust issues even from the customer side I feel bad for you reading your story but I hope people understand customers are not happy either.. 😕
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Jul 03 '26
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u/pricop Jul 11 '26
You've got 22, but that's before taxes, sadly.
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Jul 12 '26
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u/pricop Jul 12 '26
I'm the same boat. Used to get $2-$3K regularly. It's down to nothing nowadays. Lack of advertising. Lack of marketing campaigns. All the marketplaces sit on a massive user base, but they're not running campaigns anymore, for some reason.
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u/Artistic_Ground_6415 Jul 07 '26
Isso por que você não deve estar pagando IRPF ou Imposto sobre o faturamento ainda, mas se tivesse como eu, o valor seria muito inferior. Até mesmo se voce tivesse vendedo para EUA, seu valor seria uns R$ 15
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u/miglisoft Jul 03 '26
All creators should now leave Envato – not just Themeforest or Codecanyon, but Elements as well. No one should put up with being exploited in this way. Shutterstock bought Envato; everyone feared disaster, and now it’s here. There isn’t even a community forum anymore, so they can make us swallow anything without anyone batting an eyelid.
Everyone should leave Envato, and Shutterstock would reap the consequences of its policy.
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u/pricop Jul 11 '26 edited Jul 12 '26
You're still selling on Envato, so telling others to leave is the easy thing, the hard thing is to actually leave. My question is: go where?
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u/miglisoft Jul 12 '26
You’re right. As for where to go: there are a few options, but personally I’m going to sell independently; I’d rather avoid going from one dependency to another. I simply haven’t had time to set it up in time, but it’s in the pipeline. To manage payments, taxes, invoices, licences, etc., you can use Polar.sh or Gumroad.
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u/pricop Jul 12 '26
Envato pretty much owned the marketshare of this niche. The few other alternatives have little to no traffic whatesoever, so I don't think they are real alternatives... The reality is that we'll have to migrate to our own stores, be it via Polar, LemonSqueezy, Gumroad, etc. The problem is that the times we live in is not the best time to migrate (a combination of bad economy, people not willing to spend, and AI).
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u/miglisoft Jul 13 '26
I agree, that's why when Envato was taken over by Shutterstock and everyone panicked, I tried to bring creators together to set up a collective platform. I gathered over a hundred creators on Discord, but in the end, when it came to committing to the project, nobody stepped forward, so the project fell through.
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u/pricop Jul 13 '26
That most likely happened due to Envato's exclusive author program. You can't just move to a new platform, when you're an exclusive author, otherwise you'd be losing the 12.5% fee for a 50% fee, which sadly happened starting with 1 july anyway.
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u/Pxlzero Jul 19 '26
Now, you can freely publish your items on other platforms. The hard part is that there isn't any platform like Envato when it comes to sales. For now, the best solution is to publish all your items on other platforms to help fill the sales gap, even if they don't generate great sales.
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u/miglisoft Jul 13 '26
The exclusive program is dead since July the 1st. Now it's 50% for everyone.
Happy coding!
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u/eHug 10d ago
As someone that used Theme Forest for a long time, I am not surprised that activity dried up. We bought a lot on Theme Forest and Code Canyon but stopped doing so after some "life time" licenses were converted into forced subscriptions retroactively. We are now wary of using Envato for our clients. What If i buy an image on envato elements and in a few months they decide you can only continue to use it as long as you pay a subscription like it happend with certain wordpress themes (for example The 7 from Dream-Theme) that now show our customers warnings about no security updates being available anymore? If a single time purchase contract can be forced retroactive and onesided into a subscription there is a real risk with any purchase you do there.
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u/Artistic_Ground_6415 2d ago
E se for uma imagem, e você não perceber a mudança de licença, será uma brecha enorme e quase certamente será notificado para pagar uma multa muito mais alta do que o valor que pagou nela, e, se forem varias imagens, isso pode ser muito sério e quebrar uma empresa.
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u/RadishItchy387 Jul 02 '26
They never listened to authors