GoodNotes Planner: Build and Sell One That Works

A GoodNotes planner is a hyperlinked PDF, or a .goodnotes file, that the app opens as a notebook you write on, and the same product is sold at $9.99 in one place and $269.99 in another. If you're buying one, the Marketplace inside the app is the cheap end and it's fine. If you're building one to sell, the channel decides more than the file does. The Marketplace takes applications, pays a commission you learn at onboarding, and pays it quarterly by bank transfer. Etsy leaves you about 87% of a $12.99 planner. A direct link leaves about 86%.

And "one that works" has a specific meaning I didn't expect to find in the listings themselves. Two 134-page planners on the Marketplace are 389 and 364 megabytes. A 661-page one is 1.36 megabytes. The free tier of Goodnotes gives you 100 megabytes of storage.

Everything below is from Goodnotes' own pages, three live Marketplace listings, one direct seller ranking for this term, and the fee pages of Etsy and Gumroad, all loaded 15 September 2026.

Two Price Universes Under One Phrase

The fourth result for this search is Goodnotes' own roundup of eleven planners from December 2025, and the seventh is one designer's shop selling a hyperlinked PDF planner in five editions. Put them next to each other and you can see the whole market.

Of the eleven Marketplace planners in the roundup, five are $9.99, four are $11.99 and two are $14.99. Nothing above that. The direct seller starts at twice the Marketplace ceiling and goes to eighteen times it, and the product description is the same sentence in both places, a fully hyperlinked PDF where every date and tab links to its page.

I don't think the direct planner is eighteen times better. I think it's sold to a different buyer through a different door, with editions and add-ons that let the price climb, and nobody has to compare it to a $9.99 planner because it isn't sitting in a grid next to one. That's the argument for a shop of your own that I'd make before any argument about fees.

What The Marketplace Tells A Creator, And What It Doesn't

Goodnotes has a page for applying to sell, and it's more candid than most, so here is what it commits to and where it goes quiet.

The commission line is the one that matters and it's the one with no number. I couldn't find the rate anywhere public, and I'd treat any blog quoting one as somebody's contract rather than a policy. You apply, you wait up to three weeks, and then you find out what a sale is worth. Non-exclusivity is the saving grace, because it means you can list on the Marketplace and everywhere else and let the numbers tell you where the file belongs.

Quarterly payment by bank transfer is the other line I'd read twice. A sale in early October is paid at the end of December, after the sales are "finalized and processed", which is a phrase that can mean anything from a week to a refund window. Etsy and Gumroad pay on a schedule you can look up.

The Apple Cut Nobody Mentions

Goodnotes' support page describes buying on the Marketplace from inside the app. You press Buy, and then you "follow the Apple purchase flow pop-up shown". That's an in-app purchase.

Apple's newsroom states that its standard commission on in-app purchases is 30 percent for apps making more than a million dollars a year in proceeds, with a 15 percent Small Business rate below that. Whether Goodnotes clears a million is my inference rather than a published figure, but it's a note-taking app with a paid tier on four platforms and a marketplace, and I'd be surprised if it didn't.

So on a $12.99 planner bought inside the iOS app, $3.90 goes to Apple before Goodnotes touches it. $9.09 is the most that could reach the creator, and it doesn't, because Goodnotes' own commission comes off after Apple's. The web Marketplace can be browsed without signing in and its checkout may run differently, and the support page doesn't say, so I can't tell you the web split either.

None of the pages ranking for this term mention Apple at all. It's the largest single line in the whole transaction and it belongs to a company that isn't in the conversation.

The Same $12.99 File, Four Channels

Here's a $12.99 planner everywhere it could be listed, with published fees where they exist.

Two things stand out. First, Gumroad's Discover fee and Apple's commission are the same 30%, which tells you what marketplaces charge for bringing the buyer, and Goodnotes' cut on top of Apple's means the Marketplace is the most expensive door on this table by an amount nobody will tell you. Second, on the routes with published fees, the spread is small. Etsy and Gumroad direct are within twelve cents of each other on a $12.99 file, so the fee percentages barely separate the published routes, and the decision comes down to which door has buyers behind it.

The Etsy stack, including when the Offsite Ads fee applies and how the $10,000 threshold works, is in how to sell digital downloads on Etsy. What every fee is a percentage of matters more than the percentage, and that piece walks through it.

The 389 Megabyte Planner

This is the part about building one that works, and I'd have skipped it if the listings hadn't handed me the evidence.

Every Marketplace listing shows a "What you'll get" block with compatibility, file size, paper size, layout and page count. I read three.

Three orders of magnitude between the two designs, on the same platform, for the same kind of product. The difference is almost certainly that the first two were exported with every page as a flattened image and the third was exported as vector pages with real PDF links, though I'm reading that from the numbers rather than from the files. A page of lines and boxes drawn as shapes weighs almost nothing. The same page rendered as a high-resolution picture weighs three megabytes, and 134 of them weigh what a feature film used to.

Now the collision. Goodnotes' free plan allows three notebooks and 100 megabytes of storage. The 389 megabyte planner does not fit in a free account at all. The buyer who chose it because it was pretty finds that out after paying, and the creator finds out in a review. The 661-page planner fits with room for 70 more copies.

If you're building, that's the test to run before pricing. Export, look at the file size, and if a hundred pages is over a hundred megabytes you've flattened something. The full checklist for testing links, page dimensions and cross-app behaviour is in digital planning iPad setup, and I won't repeat it, but file size is the check that's missing from it and from every guide I've read.

Which To Build

Goodnotes tells creators what performs, and for once I'd take a platform's word for it, because they can see the sales. Design quality, clear organisation, practical function, and strong thumbnail and gallery images. Seasonal and productivity products.

My own read, having priced seven digital products between $29 and $49, is narrower. Build undated before dated, because an undated planner sells in March and a 2026 planner is discounted by July. Build one style properly rather than four colourways, because the 134-page planner above exists in at least five colours, and judging by the two I read, each one is a separate listing in the hundreds of megabytes that has to be maintained. And build the cover as a product of its own, since covers are a Marketplace category with its own carousel and a far smaller file, which is the subject of GoodNotes notebook cover sizes.

Then price it where the channel puts it. On the Marketplace that's $9.99 to $14.99, because that's the grid. On your own site it can be $29.99 with editions, because the buyer arrived by a different road and isn't comparing.

Questions

Is there a planner on Goodnotes? Hundreds, in the Marketplace, reachable from the app sidebar or at marketplace.goodnotes.com without signing in. On one load of the home page I counted 23 items labelled Free and 12 more labelled free for subscribers, so the free end is real.

Does Goodnotes have free planner templates? Yes, per the count above, and the paid planners in Goodnotes' own roundup run $9.99 to $14.99. Prices for individual listings didn't render in what I could read, so check the listing itself.

Is Goodnotes a monthly fee? Yearly. Free covers three notebooks and 100 megabytes. Essential is $11.99 a year with unlimited notebooks and 5 gigabytes. Pro is $35.99 a year, and an AI Pass adds $9.99 a month on top of either. The fee is the cost most planner guides leave out, and digital planner prices shows what it does to the real total.

Is there a free version of Goodnotes? Yes, the three-notebook tier above, which fits a small planner and not a large one, per the file sizes in the table.

Which is better for me, Notion or Goodnotes? Goodnotes if you want to write with a pencil on something that looks like paper. Notion if you want a database with a calendar view and don't mind typing. They're different products for different hands, and most people who try both keep one.

Which is better, Goodnotes or Notability? For a hyperlinked PDF planner, either works, and the free-tier limits differ, which is what tends to decide it. The app comparison with current prices is in iPad planner apps vs PDF files.

Can I sell the same planner on the Marketplace and Etsy? Yes. Goodnotes says it doesn't require exclusivity, and I'd list in both and watch which one sells before deciding where the file lives.

What I'd Do

Export the planner, read the file size, fix it if it's absurd. That's an hour and it prevents the worst review you can get.

List it on Etsy or a direct link first, because you'll know your margin the same day and be paid on a schedule you can find. Apply to the Marketplace at the same time and treat the three-week wait as free. When the contract arrives, do the sum on this page with the real commission in place of the blank, and only then decide whether the Marketplace's buyers are worth what the Marketplace and Apple keep.

And if the file is good enough to sell for $29.99 with editions, don't put it in a $9.99 grid. That's the one decision on this page that no fee percentage can undo.