How to sell Minecraft plugins in 2026: marketplaces, ad-share sites, or your own store

Three models, often mixed. Sale marketplaces (BuiltByBit, Voxel Shop, SpigotMC's premium resources) list your plugin in front of server owners and take their cut per sale or through membership tiers. Ad-share platforms (Modrinth, CurseForge) pay you for downloads and popularity out of advertising revenue, and cannot sell your plugin for a price at all. And a store you run yourself sells direct at your own margin, with license keys doing the delivery. Serious plugin businesses usually pair a marketplace or ad-share presence for discovery with a direct store for margin.

One update many developers have missed: Polymart is now Voxel Shop. polymart.org redirects to voxel.shop, which describes itself as in open beta. BuiltByBit remains the biggest paid-resource marketplace, and SpigotMC's premium-resource section remains the classic venue, with sellers handling their own payment accounts under Spigot's guidelines.

Each marketplace publishes its selling fees in its own help pages: BuiltByBit's wiki lists a platform fee plus a gateway fee per transaction, and Voxel Shop and SpigotMC set their own terms for premium resources. Those terms move fast enough that a percentage printed here would mislead you within the year; this niche has seen three fee changes and one rebrand across its platforms since late 2025. So before committing a catalog anywhere, open the platform's current fee page, note the payout minimums and gateway costs, and re-check after any rebrand, because rebrands are exactly when terms move.

Modrinth's creator monetization is an advertising split, documented plainly in its legal pages: "The advertising revenue of the entire website and app is split 75% to creators and 25% to Modrinth", distributed by points where "each page view and in-app download counts as a point", with revenue arriving on a roughly 60-day delay. CurseForge's reward program works on points too: "the value of a single point is $0.05 USD", with no fixed downloads-to-points rate, cashable out from $5.

Both are worth having for anything you distribute free: real money for downloads you were giving away anyway. Neither is a sales channel. You cannot set a price on Modrinth or CurseForge, so for a premium plugin they complement a store rather than replace one.

The premium-plugin scene has always leaned on direct sales: your own site, your own prices, a license key per buyer. That is the shape ByteSell is built for. Checkout runs at 0% on every plan, cards go through your own Stripe or PayPal, crypto settles to your own wallet, and keys are delivered automatically from pools you upload, with an API for wiring the rest of your stack to it. Files of any size ship on the paid tiers (10 GB per file on Pro), which covers any plugin jar and its resource packs many times over.

The honest trade is the same as everywhere in this series: a direct store brings no marketplace traffic, so it fits developers whose plugins already have a name on the forums, a Discord, or an ad-share following that can be pointed at a store link. Discovery on the marketplaces, margin on your own store, and your customer list finally in a place you can export. Prices are on the pricing page.

• Check the fee page the week you commit

  Booth, Jinxxy, and Tebex all changed prices within the last year, and Polymart changed its name. The number on the platform's own page today is the only one that counts.

• Check what happens to your buyers if you leave

  Can you export customers and license records? A marketplace that owns your buyer relationships owns your renewal revenue too.

• Keep the free tier working for you

  A free lite version on Modrinth or CurseForge earns ad-share money and functions as the top of your funnel. The paid tier lives where your margin does.