If you’re on the hunt for a side hustle with almost no startup costs and real passive income potential, selling digital stickers is worth a serious look.
Digital planners have exploded in popularity, and with that boom has come a massive demand for the stickers that go with them – people want fresh, creative designs to personalize their schedules and trackers, and they’re genuinely happy to pay for them.
Below you’ll find everything you need to know about how to make digital stickers to sell, where to sell them, and how to set yourself up for income that keeps coming in long after the work is done.
Gold City Ventures runs a free workshop on how to sell digital products – including stickers – on Etsy, and their students have collectively earned over $3.3 million doing exactly this. It covers everything from finding profitable niches to pricing and marketing your products.
- Completely free to attend
- Perfect if you have little time, money, or experience
- Focused on profit from day one
What are digital stickers?
Digital stickers are PNG image files that work exactly like physical stickers – except they’re used on digital documents rather than paper.
You’ll most often see them used with digital planners – things like budget planners or weekly schedules that people manage on their tablet or phone instead of printing out.
They might be a little star to mark something positive, a colorful reminder flag, a cute illustration to brighten up a page, or a bold icon to highlight an important date. Essentially, if it can go on a physical planner, there’s a digital version of it.
How much can you make selling digital stickers?
Individual packs typically sell for between $3 and $9 on Etsy, depending on the size and quality of the bundle. A pack of around 400 stickers tends to sit around the $5 mark.
What makes this side hustle particularly attractive is that after your initial outlay on design software, your only ongoing costs are Etsy listing fees – so pretty much everything you earn beyond that is profit. It can also grow into a genuine passive income stream over time, since digital products keep selling without you needing to do anything new.
And it’s worth knowing that some sellers in this space have reported making over $7,000 in their first six months – which is a serious return for a side hustle with almost no ongoing costs. If you’re looking for more things you can make and sell online to build up multiple income streams, digital stickers are one of the more accessible options out there.
How to make digital stickers to sell
The process isn’t complicated, but getting a workflow in place that lets you produce designs quickly does take a little time. That speed matters – the more sticker packs you have listed, the more chances you have of making sales.
Here’s how to get started from scratch, even if you’ve never made anything like this before.
(And if you’re also curious about making physical stickers to sell, that’s a whole separate path worth exploring too.)
1. Choose your design tool
You’ll need design software to create your stickers, and the good news is that you don’t need anything expensive or complicated.
Canva is the easiest starting point – it works in your browser, has a generous free tier, and even beginners can produce good-looking designs without much of a learning curve.
If you’re serious about turning this into a real side hustle, Canva Pro is worth considering for its 420,000+ premium templates, more advanced editing features, and better folder organization for managing a large product catalog. You can try it free for 30 days before committing.
Other options include Adobe Illustrator (more powerful, but has a steeper learning curve) and Procreate on iPad (great if you prefer a more hands-on, drawing-based approach).
2. Use AI tools to spark design ideas
If coming up with original designs feels intimidating, AI image generators are worth experimenting with as a starting point – particularly for getting the look of a sticker right before you refine it in Canva.
Ideogram is one of the better options for sticker-style graphics specifically, since it handles flat, illustrative imagery well. You’d still do your final editing and PNG export in Canva or a similar tool, but Ideogram can be a genuinely useful way to kick off a design when you’re feeling stuck for ideas.
3. Design your stickers
You genuinely don’t need to be artistic to make digital stickers that sell well. Canva’s built-in elements, text tools, and customizable templates mean you can create professional-looking designs without knowing how to draw.
A good starting point is thinking about what you’d actually want in a digital planner. The stickers you’d use yourself are almost certainly the ones other people are searching for too – and browsing Etsy’s best-sellers in the sticker category helps you spot what’s working and where there might be gaps.
Some of the most consistently popular niches include budget and finance trackers, habit and mood tracking stickers, seasonal and holiday themes, cute food or nature illustrations, and motivational quotes. If you already sell crafts that make money, you probably have a good sense of which styles tend to resonate with buyers.
4. Build reusable sticker templates
This step is optional when you’re just starting out, but it becomes essential the moment you want to scale up.
Creating your own reusable templates in Canva means you can produce large batches of variations – different colors, fonts, and seasonal themes – without rebuilding every design from scratch. With the right system, it’s entirely possible to go from one base design to 400 finished stickers in under an hour.
FYI: The Gold City Ventures free workshop covers exactly this kind of strategic approach to building a digital product business on Etsy – including how to create products efficiently and price them for profit from the start.
5. Export your stickers as PNG files
Once your designs are ready, you’ll export them as PNG files with a transparent background – that transparency is important, because it’s what allows the stickers to sit naturally on top of whatever digital planner page the buyer is using.
In Canva, this is as simple as downloading your design and selecting “PNG” with the transparent background option checked. You’ll then bundle your files into a ZIP folder, which is what you actually deliver to the customer after purchase.
A note on print-at-home stickers
Digital stickers designed for use on digital planners aren’t the only format worth selling. You can also create sticker files that customers download and print themselves at home – these are sometimes called “printable stickers” and they sell well to a different but equally enthusiastic audience.
Printable stickers tend to include cut guides or specific sizing, and buyers print them on sticker paper using their home printer – then peel and apply just like regular stickers. It’s a slightly different design process, but the same core skills apply, and it opens up a wider range of potential buyers.
There’s also a third route worth knowing about: Printify is a free print-on-demand service that handles the printing and shipping of physical stickers – including kiss-cut vinyl stickers, die-cut stickers, and full sticker sheets – completely on your behalf.
You design the sticker and list it in your store, while Printify handles the rest, including creating the stickers and shipping them to your customers. This means there’s no upfront inventory or printing costs involved, as well as minimal hassle.
Each of these formats can live happily in the same Etsy shop, so there’s no reason you can’t offer more than one as your catalog grows.
Sticker Making 101 by Mim Jenkinson is a step-by-step beginner course designed for anyone who wants to create beautiful stickers – including printable sticker files – without wasting paper, ink, or hours of trial and error. Mim is a 5-star Etsy seller who’s helped over 20,000 students make stickers they’re proud of.
- 6 done-for-you sticker templates included
- Works with Cricut, Silhouette, or just scissors
- Lifetime access so you can learn at your own pace
How to sell digital stickers online
Making great stickers is only half the equation. Getting them in front of buyers takes a bit of deliberate setup – particularly when it comes to your Etsy store and how your listings are structured.
1. Open an Etsy store
Etsy is by far the best starting platform for selling digital stickers. The marketplace already has millions of buyers actively searching for digital products, so you’re not starting from scratch trying to build your own audience.
You can also look at selling through your own website eventually, but Etsy is the quickest way to get your first sales while you build momentum. There’s a full breakdown of how to sell digital downloads on Etsy worth reading before you set up your store if you haven’t sold there before.
Not sure where to start with selling on Etsy? The Gold City Ventures free workshop walks you through the whole process of building a digital product business on Etsy – from choosing profitable niches to getting your listings found.
Their students have earned over $3.3 million selling digital products, and it won’t cost you a thing to watch.
2. Get your Etsy SEO right
Listing your products and hoping people find them isn’t a strategy – you need the right keywords in your titles, tags, and descriptions so that Etsy’s search actually surfaces your listings to buyers.
Think about what someone would type when they’re looking for what you’re selling – things like “digital planner stickers,” “budget tracker PNG,” or “cute habit stickers for GoodNotes.” The more specific and buyer-focused your keyword choices are, the better your listings will perform.
FYI: Etsy’s own search trends feature – visible in your Seller Dashboard – is a solid free tool for researching which search terms are getting traction right now. Looking at what keywords top-selling sticker shops use in their own listings is also a great way to find phrases worth targeting.
3. Price your sticker packs competitively
Most digital sticker packs on Etsy sell for between $3 and $9, with larger bundles at the higher end of that range. Checking what comparable shops are charging gives you a solid baseline to work from.
Starting on the slightly lower end while you build reviews isn’t a bad move – social proof matters on Etsy, and a handful of positive reviews early on can do a lot for your conversion rate. You can always adjust your pricing upward once your shop has some traction.
4. Set up your brand name and social presence
Even if Etsy is your main selling channel, it’s worth securing your business name on other platforms early – before someone else takes it.
At a minimum, claim your name on Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest. Those three are the most useful for promoting creative digital products, and Pinterest in particular can drive meaningful traffic to an Etsy sticker shop. It’s also worth registering a domain name – it costs less than $3 a month and is one of those small investments that pays off if your shop ever grows beyond Etsy.
5. Market your products consistently
The shops that do best on Etsy aren’t just the ones with the best designs – they’re the ones that consistently show up on social media and keep their listings fresh.
Posting your sticker designs on Pinterest and Instagram, running occasional Etsy promotions, and adding new products regularly all help keep your shop visible. It doesn’t have to be a huge time commitment, especially once you have a template workflow in place that makes creating new designs fast.
Is selling digital stickers worth it?
For the right person, genuinely yes. The business model works because the economics are so favorable – there’s no inventory, no printing, no shipping, and your products can keep selling indefinitely once they’re listed.
It tends to suit people who already use digital planners themselves, or who are curious about the space, because that lived experience translates into better product ideas. If you’re the kind of person who has opinions about what makes a good planner sticker, that instinct is a real advantage when it comes to creating designs that actually sell.
It also helps to enjoy the creative side of things, since building up a catalog does take time upfront. If that kind of work appeals to you – similar to how people who make money from drawing or those who sell handmade crafts for profit tend to genuinely enjoy those pursuits – then digital sticker selling has a lot going for it.
The passive income potential here is real. Once you’ve built up a solid library of sticker packs, your Etsy shop can generate consistent sales without you actively working on it. Many sellers reach a point where they only add new designs occasionally while their existing listings keep earning in the background.
Other creative side hustles worth exploring
If the idea of turning creative skills into online income appeals to you, digital stickers are just one option to consider.
There are over 100 crafts that genuinely make money from home, many of which translate just as well to online selling as to local markets. If the holiday season is your most creative time of year, there are also plenty of Christmas crafts that sell well and can bring in solid extra income.
If you have a voice you enjoy using, getting paid to record your voice is another low-barrier creative side hustle. And for those with broader artistic interests, the guide on ways to make money from drawing covers a range of options from illustration work to selling digital art.
