YouTube: Are you ready for the new TPT? Exclusive Seller Membership | TPT Seller Tip E97
TPT is discontinuing their premium membership. What does this new TPT exclusive seller membership mean for your store and your bottom line?
TPT recently announced major changes to their subscription plans, leaving many sellers with questions about the future of the marketplace. This video breaks down the announcement, why there are strong feelings in the community right now, and what you should consider before the upcoming town hall.
Whether you are a full-time teacherpreneur or just getting started, these platform shifts impact your TPT business strategy. We look at the timeline of these updates and what they might signal for the platform’s long-term direction. It is about understanding the landscape so you can make informed decisions for your TPT seller account.
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Video
Script
Introduction
So. There are some strong feelings in TPT land right now. And it’s only the weekend after TPT announced they’re discontinuing the Premium membership and launching a new Exclusive membership. This video is being recorded on Sunday, October 4, 2026. Last Thursday, TPT announced the change to their membership plans. This Thursday, October 8, 2026, TPT is doing a Town Hall where they’re going to talk about their vision for the future. Thanks, TPT. You’ve given me lots of content to talk about on this channel.
The game is changing. TPT is making a business decision. And we need to make one too. At some point, we’re going to have to answer a very practical question: What do I actually need from TPT? But before we can get to that, I think we need to address how people are feeling. Today’s video is a high level look at how people are reacting. Next weekend, I’m hoping to do a deeper dive into the specifics and our options. I’m waiting until after the Town Hall so we can make a more informed decision.
Hi, my name is Mike Fuchigami and I’m the host of the SEOTpreneur YouTube community. For the past few days, I’ve been having lots of conversations with TPT sellers. Some are in the Top 100. Some haven’t made their first $100 yet. And people are all over the place. Some are furious. Some feel betrayed. Some are cautiously optimistic (but you’d never know that depending on where you hang out in TPT land.) Some people love the Facebook groups right now because they feel heard. They can go in there and see other people saying the same things they’re thinking. Other people are staying away from those groups because they just don’t have the emotional bandwidth to deal with the loud voices right now.
And I think one of the things that’s becoming really clear to me is that it’s okay to feel multiple things at the same time. You can feel betrayed by TPT and still understand where they might be coming from. You can be insulted by their offer and still decide that Exclusive makes the most sense for your business. You can feel guilty about staying and also feel excited about what the future might look like if the marketplace changes. And you can appreciate how TPT was the start of your entrepreneurial adventure while also wondering if it’s still a good fit at this point in time.
Walking together for a long time doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to walk together forever. It might. Some teachers stay at one school for their whole career. But it’s okay to change schools. And sometimes we get downsized and forced out of a school that we loved. And sometimes we want to leave a school but there are no positions available. Life happens.
In this video, I’m going to talk about three things. First, I want to talk about how we’re processing all of this and I wonder if we can get to a place where we can think clearly about the decision in front of us. Second, I want to wonder about what TPT may be trying to accomplish and what TPT should do. And finally, I want to start thinking about what we actually need from TPT (or any platform), so that when we come back to the actual offer in the next video, we’re asking the right questions.
Make sure to watch to the end because if you’ve decided that you’re done with TPT, I’m going to help you use AI to move your store off the platform.
1. How do you feel about TPT’s exclusive seller membership?
How are you feeling about TPT’s exclusive membership? Sometimes when I hear an idea, I like to wonder where that person is coming from. Who is the speaker, what is their lived experience, and how do they benefit if their idea is accepted? Context matters.
I’ve made $120,000 lifetime from TPT. Some people have made a lot more. Some people have made a lot less. Lately, my store earnings have plummeted. I make around $10,000 per year right now, but I don’t really work on my store. I’m not active. I haven’t been making new products and I haven’t been creating new repeat customers. Why? Because I’m following the money and focusing on coaching and client work. Sure, I have a TPT seller store and yes, I have a PRO membership, but my bread and butter comes from one-to-one consulting. I work with brick-and-mortar stores in Ottawa, Canada, and I work with content creators like TPT sellers. Some of the TPT sellers I coach are in the Top 100 and Top 1,000. I help business owners use AI to accelerate their systems. We use data to understand where the holes are so we can follow the money.
So when I look at TPT’s exclusive membership, consider my financial reality. If I’m making $10,000 on TPT and my payout goes from 80% to 55%, that’s a 25 percentage point difference. That’s $2,500 less. That hurts. But compare that with a seller who makes $100,000 on TPT in a single year. If they choose Basic, their earnings drop by $25,000. And if you make a million dollars a year on TPT, we’re talking about a drop of $250,000. That’s not insignificant.
So, Mike, shut the *!@# up about staying calm. I’m losing a quarter million dollars. What the !@#$ do you know about this?
I don’t. I don’t know anything about your pain. I don’t know what you’re going through or how this change will hurt you. I’m sorry you’re going through this. The only thing I know about is me. I used to teach Grade 8 for 13 years. I left the profession before COVID. I chose to leave, not because I wanted to, but because I had to. I loved being in the classroom. Maybe eventually I would have become a principal. Who knows. Then everything changed.
My school taught a lesson about bullying to all of the Grade 8s. They called us to the auditorium and showed us a play where we watched the main character get bullied. He solved his problem by coming to school and shooting his bullies. The final moments of the play were monologues from students describing the murders. The lesson ended with a spotlight on the school shooter justifying the mass killing. And that was it. Students were dismissed. Teachers were in shock. Parents were deliberately not told about what their kids had just witnessed. Crazy, right?
I went to a dark place. I had mental health support. I had counselling. I had family. But for me, the tipping point was when I realized that there might be a kid out there going through how I was feeling without support. And I started worrying about that kid. I thought about a student mental health organization that raised awareness after a Grade 9 student died by suicide. I knew that you can’t always tell how a student was doing from the outside. And I worried that there was a student like that sitting in the crowd. And I broke.
I’d like to say that this mental health crisis led to great things, but I’m not there yet. Yes, I’m in a much better place than where I was. But it’s a slow grind. It’s been seven years and I’m still trying to rebuild my future.
When I was raw with emotion, if someone had come up to me and said, “Mike, relax. Calm down. It’s not a big deal,” that would have crushed me. So, if you need to stop this video and come back to it later, that’s okay. These things take time.
When you’re ready… I wonder how we can move towards a place of equanimity. And for me, equanimity means trying to respond from an even keel. Something great happens. Awesome. How can we lean into this? Something horrible happens. Ok. What do we need to do? I’m not always able to stay calm. But I am learning to recognize what triggers me and I’m learning how to process what I’m feeling. I want to get myself back to a place where I can look at what’s actually the issue in front of me.
Because business is business and I wonder if we can make better business decisions when we’re calm. If TPT announces something incredible this Thursday, I don’t want to get swept up in the excitement. If TPT announces something that makes me furious, I don’t want the anger making the decision either. We can feel those emotions. We can have more than one emotion at the same time. But eventually, we still have to make a business decision. So let’s move to the second question.
2. What is TPT’s end game with the TPT Exclusive Seller Membership?
What might TPT actually be trying to accomplish? If you look at the TPT Seller blog post, their argument is that when teachers discover a seller on TPT and then the sale moves somewhere else, that makes it harder for TPT to grow the marketplace. Their vision seems to be that if more of those transactions stay on TPT, then the marketplace is stronger for everyone.
This is where I keep thinking about Nickelback. There’s a quote in a documentary that says, “We play Nickelback songs to Nickelback fans.” Some people love nickelback. Some people hate them. Rather than spending time trying to convince a hater to come to a concert and have a good time, Nickelback puts their energy into supporting their fans.
If you don’t like Nickleback, you don’t have to go to their concert or buy their music. During their peak in 2009 they were doing non-stop concerts to arenas with an average of 10 to 15 thousand people. In 2023, their crowd size average is the same, although they’re doing significantly fewer shows. Some people say that everyone hates nickleback and it’s true that a lot of people don’t like them (or say they don’t like them) but Nickleback is still around making music for their ideal customer avatar
Maybe TPT is doing some kind of version of that. Maybe they’re deciding what kind of seller they want to build the next evolution of TPT around. Maybe they want sellers who are going to build their businesses primarily inside the TPT ecosystem, send buyers to TPT, and help make TPT stronger. If that’s the vision, they’re allowed to choose that vision.
But there’s another side to the Nickelback metaphor. We get to choose too. Nickelback can decide who their fans are, but I don’t have to buy the album. TPT can decide who it wants to build for, but if the seller they’re building for no longer looks like me, that doesn’t automatically mean TPT is wrong or I’m wrong. It just might mean we’re no longer a good fit.
And that brings me to Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift today is not the same person she was when she started in country music. Artists evolve. Businesses evolve. Platforms evolve. TPT is allowed to become something different from what it was five years ago or ten years ago. But fans also get to decide whether they want to follow every era. You can love what something used to mean to you and still decide that the new direction isn’t right for you. I love Taylor’s pop music. I’m not a fan of her folk songs. So if TPT is changing, I don’t think the question is automatically, “Who’s the villain?” I think the more useful question is, “Where are they trying to go, and do I want to go there with them?” If you like this video, can you please click the like button. This encourages me to make more content like this one.
I wonder if this is like being a principal at a school. Let’s say you’ve been at the school for a few years. You understand what’s worked. But you also have a vision for where the school needs to grow because the world is changing. And maybe you have veteran teachers who have been teaching in a particular way for a long time. Sit down. Don’t talk. Memorize facts for the test. What happens if you believe in a different future? So now you have a leadership decision to make.
This reminds me of the book, Good to Great by Jim Collins. He talks about the importance of getting the right people on the bus. I’m not saying that sellers who don’t want Exclusive are the wrong people. I’m not saying they’re bad sellers, outdated sellers, or people who don’t deserve to be there. I’m talking about fit. If the bus company decides where the bus is going, they have to find drivers who are excited to drive to those destinations. And I wonder if that’s part of what TPT is doing. I wonder if they have a vision for what TPT needs to look like in the next few years, and they’ve decided they’re willing to make changes even if some long-standing sellers decide not to come with them.
But this is where intent versus impact matters. TPT may genuinely believe that this will make the marketplace stronger. They are allowed to make a decision about where they want their company to go. But good intentions do not automatically create good impact.
Let’s go back to the play at my school. I’m sure the intent was to create a powerful lesson about bullying. I’m sure somebody believed that showing the worst possible outcome would make students think differently about how they treated each other. That may have been the intent. But the impact on me was very different. And we have no idea what the impact was on every student sitting in that auditorium who then went back to class or went home without support to process what they had just watched.
I don’t think people in authority can simply say, we didn’t intend to cause harm, so we’re not responsible for any negative consequences to our actions. Likewise, I don’t think TPT can say, we didn’t intend to cause harm, so we’re not responsible for any negative consequences, either.
Multiple things can be true. TPT can have a rationale that makes sense inside TPT, and this decision can still hurt people. TPT can believe it is protecting the future of the marketplace, and a seller can still look at the change and say, “This damages my livelihood.” Understanding intent does not require you to pretend the impact is fine.
And companies can change too. They can make a decision, see what happens, hear the feedback, get more information, and pivot. Sellers can do exactly the same thing. We make the best decisions we can with the information we have, and then if the information changes, we can change our decision.
TPT is allowed to see the pushback from the community and say, oh, I guess you’re right. If we’re asking you for exclusivity, we need a carrot, not just a stick. What if instead of a 2.5% drop in commission, we gave you a 2.5% increase in commission? What if we gave you keyword search volume for the last two years instead of 30 days? What if we gave exclusive members a boost in TPT SEO ranking to help our loyal fans?
If TPT announces these changes, it doesn’t necessarily mean a conspiracy theory. (I mean, we don’t know. They could have a Machiavellian consultant who said low ball them with 77.5% commission so that when you offer an 82.5% commission rate, they’re thankful.) But TPT announcing changes could simply mean they were listening to feedback.
We’ll never know the whole story. Maybe TPTs legal team read through the new exclusive terms and said in order to win an anti trust case, you have to drop the commission to 77.5% so that there isn’t that big of a difference between basic and exclusive. So maybe the 77.5% commission rate is non negotiable. Who knows!
We don’t know TPT’s whole vision yet. Hopefully the Town Hall gives us more information. But whatever TPT says next Thursday, two things will happen. TPT gets to make a business decision. And we get to make one too. Which brings us back to the third question:
3. What do you need from TPT (or another platform?)
What do I actually need from TPT (or another platform?) We talked about TPTs exclusive membership yesterday in the PRO community during our Saturday staffroom zoom call. Someone raised the idea of Christopher Robin. Part of me wants this to become a Christopher Robin moment for sellers who decide it’s time to leave TPT. I wonder if we can get to the place where we look back and say, “That was an important chapter of my business. It mattered. We built something together. And now it’s time for me to go in a different direction.”
But the metaphor isn’t perfect. Pooh and Piglet aren’t going to Christopher Robin and saying, “You can stay in the Hundred Acre Wood, but you have to be exclusive and only spend time with us.” Actually, when I say that out loud, that sounds like an unhealthy relationship. (Side note: being exclusive doesn’t automatically mean something is unhealthy. People decide to be exclusive and get married. Musicians sign contracts to be exclusive to recording companies. I’m just saying it’s kind of funny to imagine a bunch of stuffed animals going to Christopher Robin saying, hey! Only play with us.)
So maybe the question is how can we turn this into a positive Christopher Robin moment instead of bad blood. Is it possible to recognize the good in a relationship and still leave? Can you acknowledge that the relationship mattered without pretending that you like how it ended?
Maybe. Maybe not. All I know is these things take time. It’s been seven years since my mental health crisis at school and the end of my classroom career. I’ve made a lot of progress. I’m in a much better place. But I’m still working to accept what happened and the end of that chapter. Life will never be the same. So I’m not going to sit here and tell somebody whose business just changed underneath them that they need to find a positive ending. Maybe someday you can. Maybe you can’t. I don’t know.
What I do know is that at some point, we still have to ask a practical question: What do I actually need from TPT at this stage of my business? And maybe the answer is traffic. Maybe it’s discovery. Maybe it’s the marketplace. Maybe it’s the TPT brand. Maybe it’s the income. Whatever your answer is, be specific about it.
Then ask the next question: Where is my line in the sand? What would make me stay? What would make me leave? What am I willing to compromise on? What does my business need that I’m not willing to give up?
And then look at your actual numbers. What happens if you choose Exclusive? What happens if you choose Basic? What happens if you eventually leave? Give your business data to AI and ask it to analyze multiple scenarios. Ask it to push back on you. If you say, “I think I can make more money if I join a new marketplace with a bunch of other big sellers,” then one of the questions AI should ask you is, “What evidence do you have that you’ll actually make sales?” And then next weekend, we can come back and talk about the actual offer with more information on the table.
AI prompt to download your TPT store (if you’re closing your TPT account)
Okay. I promised you an AI prompt if you’ve decided that you’re done with TPT. Before I give it to you, I would only do this if you’ve actually decided you’re leaving and burning bridges. If you’re still in wait-and-see mode, I would hold off on this AI prompt, and I’ll explain why in a second.
Make sure you’re using the paid version of AI and the highest level of thinking and effort that you have available. Then say this:
We are prompt engineering. Ask me questions before you create this prompt. I’m leaving TPT. I want to download all my product descriptions, products, covers, reviews and anything else you think I might need from TPT. What questions do you have before you create this prompt?And then let AI have a conversation with you. It might ask where you want things saved. It might ask what you want to preserve. Your answers are going to be different from somebody else’s answers, and that’s the point. This is not a generic one-size-fits-all migration prompt.
Once you make that prompt with AI, you can take it into something like ChatGPT Codex or Claude Code on your computer and use a browser agent to work through the steps. You would manually log into your account, and then the AI agent can work through the process you designed with it to collect and save the information you decided you need. If you are mad and done with TPT, that’s one way out.
But here’s the bigger warning. We don’t know how TPT is going to respond to that level of automation. We don’t know what they can detect. We don’t know whether going through product edit pages one at a time with an automated browser could trigger something on your account or potentially get your store shut down. Nobody knows. So if you’re saying, “I’m done. I’m leaving anyway,” you may look at that risk differently. If you’re saying, “I’m angry, but I might stay,” I would not rush into that automation right now.
If you have any questions, leave them in the comments or email me directly at [email protected] – Making YouTube videos take a long time. If you want to hear my current thoughts about TPT, sign up for my email newsletter at SEOTpreneur.com/email
So that’s where I’m at right now. Feel what we need to feel. And when you have the bandwidth, start figuring out what you actually need, where your line in the sand is, and what your numbers say. Then when TPT does the Town Hall this Thursday Oct 8, 2026, listen to what they say through the lens of your business instead of the loudest voice in a Facebook group.
TPT gets to decide what it wants its future to look like. You get to decide what you need yours to look like. And then in Part 2, once we know more, we can look at the actual offer and decide what the new information changes. Subscribe if you want more information like this and I’ll see you in the next one. Bye for now!