Exclusive or Basic?
Work out your own break-even.

From January 1, 2027, every TPT seller is either Exclusive or Basic. Most of the conversation about the change is about principle: should a marketplace be allowed to ask for exclusivity at all? That is a fair debate, but it does not answer the practical question in front of you, which is what each option does to your own income.

The fee structure makes that question answerable with a few numbers you already have. Put them into the calculator below and you get two things: what you would keep from your TPT sales on each membership, and how much you would need to earn from digital sales outside TPT before Basic comes out ahead.

In short: on TPT sales alone, Exclusive pays more for almost every store that sells more than about $200 to $250 a year. The real question is whether you sell digital resources anywhere else, and whether that income is bigger than the gap.

The numbers TPT has published

These are the 2027 terms from TPT's Exclusive Seller FAQ and its Seller Fees and Payout Rates page:

• Exclusive: you keep 77.5% of each sale. No transaction fee on orders over $3, and $0.15 per resource on orders under $3. Annual fee of $59.95.
• Basic: you keep 55% of each sale, minus a $0.30 transaction fee on every resource. No annual fee.
• The catch: Exclusive sellers can only sell their digital educational resources on TPT. That includes memberships, subscriptions and licenses that give access to them. Physical products, courses, Boom Cards, Kindle books, clip art and fonts are exempt. Here is the full list of what Exclusive sellers can still sell elsewhere.

Run your own numbers

Use a full year of sales if you have it. Your Seller Dashboard shows total sales and the number of resources sold. If you are not sure how many sales were in orders under $3, a rough guess is fine: it barely moves the result.

This compares a full calendar year on the 2027 terms. It leaves out the transition months: Premium sellers keep 80% through December 31 either way, and Basic sellers who join Exclusive before then get an introductory 80% until January 1. One catch for Basic sellers joining early: the exclusivity terms apply from the day you sign up, not from January 1. Premium sellers have until January 1 to move their outside sales, as the FAQ for Premium sellers explains.

A worked example

Take a store that sells $3,000 a year on TPT, across 600 resources, with 100 of them in small orders under $3. It sells nothing outside TPT.

For that store, Basic only makes sense if it could earn more than about $780 a year from digital sales somewhere else. A smaller store selling $400 a year across about 120 resources sees a gap of around $57. Below roughly $200 to $250 a year (the exact point depends on your prices), the annual fee is bigger than the extra payout and Basic keeps more.

What the calculator cannot tell you

The money is the easy part. A few things belong next to the result before you decide:

• Leaving is slow. If you go Exclusive and switch to Basic after January 1, you wait a full year before you can rejoin, and the annual fee is not refunded.
• The tools come with it. Search Analytics and Keyword Finder are Exclusive benefits. If you rely on them, Basic costs you more than the payout gap.
• All your stores move together. If you run more than one TPT store, they must all be on the same membership.
• Enforcement is real, but measured. At the Town Hall, TPT said it will monitor Exclusive stores. If a store breaks the terms, responses range from a grace period to fix things up to a penalty and a move to Basic, and TPT will contact you first except in rare cases. More detail on what counts as an exclusive product was promised for later in October.
• Outside sales are not all lost. Some buyers who used to buy on your site would buy the same product on TPT instead. You would keep 77.5% of those sales rather than nothing, so the real cost of giving up outside sales is usually smaller than the number you entered.

One focused exercise

• Open your Seller Dashboard and write down last year's total sales and resources sold.
• Add up what you earned from digital resources outside TPT in the same year, after that platform's own fees.
• Enter both above and note the difference.
• Then work through Take Stock Before You Decide to see how much of your TPT income rests on a few products and on marketplace search.