I left TPT (Teachers Pay Teachers) as a seller in 2021 when they pushed the anti-racism and censorship agenda. At the time, I wrote an extensive post about it and also hosted a guest post about the role outside equity funding was playing in these changes. If you aren’t familiar with what happened, you can read them here. Both posts have extensive comments as well.
- I Closed My Teachers Pay Teachers Store Due To Their Anti-Racist Agenda
- Teachers Pay Teachers and Equity Funding
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
TPT Purchased by iXL
Not willing to stop there in terms of alienating teacher-sellers, TPT was subsequently purchased by iXL in 2023. If you aren’t aware, iXL has been buying up education-related websites for years. According to Arya, iXL now controls all of these platforms and publishers.
IXL – The flagship personalized learning and diagnostic platform.
Teachers Pay Teachers (TpT) – The online marketplace for educator-created classroom resources, acquired in 2023.
Rosetta Stone – The language-learning platform, acquired in 2021.
Wyzant – An online tutoring marketplace connecting students with private tutors, acquired in 2021.
Dictionary.com & Thesaurus.com – Reference and language tools, acquired in 2024.
SpanishDictionary.com (Curiosity Media) – Spanish-English dictionary and language tool, acquired in 2022.
Education.com – A digital resource platform providing worksheets, games, and lesson plans, acquired in 2019.
Vocabulary.com – An interactive learning platform for improving vocabulary, acquired in 2020.
ABCya! – A provider of educational computer games and activities for children, acquired in 2018.
Quia Web & Quia Books – Tools for teacher-created online games, quizzes, and language courses.
3P Learning brands (acquired in 2020), including:
- Mathletics (online mathematics learning platform)
- Readiwriter Spelling (spelling program)
- Reading Eggs (early literacy program)
Carson Dellosa Education – A publisher of supplementary educational materials and resources, acquired in 2024.
Evan-Moor Educational Publishers – Educational publishing company acquired in 2025.
MyTutor – Online tutoring provider acquired in 2025.
Emmersion – Language assessment technology company, acquired in 2022.
So it is becoming increasingly difficult to find education platforms and publishers not owned by this one entity.
What could possibly go wrong?
I mean, where have we seen this before?
Search engines, anyone?
Social media deplatforming, anyone?
TPT’s Exclusivity Expectations
The main thing to know moving forward (which I will flesh out more below) is that TPT is now requiring sellers to ONLY sell on TPT (Exclusive level) or else drop to a Basic level. At the Basic level, TPT takes a 45% cut of your sales. Yes, you read that correctly. 45%. If you go to the Exclusive level, they “only” take 22.5% of your sales.
(At one time, they took 15%. Then they said it “had” to go to 20% but they would never ask to raise it again. So much for that.)
BUT at the Exclusive level, you cannot offer your products anywhere else. You can’t sell on Etsy. You can’t sell on your own website. If you have a membership on your website, you have to shut it down. If you have a website, all of your purchase buttons must direct to your TPT store.
This is the equivalent of agreeing that your widget can only be sold at Target (or Walmart or Meijer or whatever). It cannot be sold anywhere else, not even on your own business website.
You are entrusting your entire business to the people who make decisions at one company. And you have no say in what they do to their company while exclusively selling your widget.
TPT’s History With Teacher-Sellers
Anyone who sells printables online knows that the market has dropped off dramatically in recent years. There are many reasons for it that I won’t be explaining at this juncture. But I know from my own experience and keeping an eye on the broader discussion, that sales have dropped off significantly at TPT for many to probably most sellers. By significantly I mean 50% to 70%.
TPT has apparently decided the best way to deal with this is to demand complete loyalty from the sellers. Too many sellers made the smart business choice to diversify their earnings and opened their own website, membership site, etc. Others also sell on Etsy or other marketplaces. This is what smart business owners do.
Long-time readers and friends will remember that I became persona non grata in the TPT forums when I encouraged TPT sellers to not put all their eggs in one basket. This was when Michael Hyatt wrote his viral “Don’t Build Your House on a Rented Land” post in August 2014 after many businesses tanked when the Facebook algorithm changed dramatically. Traffic, sales, and ad revenue dropped by 70-80% for all kinds of websites basically overnight. But sellers were incredibly loyal to TPT at that point and most were not willing to even entertain that thought. They were all-in on Teachers Pay Teachers. (That was the name of the platform at the time which was subsequently changed to TPT and eliminated the word teacher from the name. A sign of things to come perhaps?)
Let’s recap where that loyalty has gotten them. Here are a few stories from my post comments. I’m bringing them forward because many sellers who are struggling to make a decision about what to do weren’t even around when these previous struggle sessions occurred.
For reference, I joined Teachers Pay Teachers when my first quarterly payout came in the mail as a paper check. I wasn’t there at the very beginning, but pretty early on (2012).
This comment from April 2021 was regarding TPT sellers begging for direct deposit.
What’s really ironic to me is at this very moment the teacher-sellers are literally pleading with TPT to provide them with direct deposit of their earnings. They have been steadily pleading for almost two weeks now and cannot get a straight answer. Sellers have been asking for direct deposit since 2013. EIGHT YEARS.
Right now unless you are an elite level seller, your earnings go through Paypal which creates all kinds of problems. Sellers lose hundreds to thousands of dollars per year due to fees. Sellers outside of the USA have all kinds of problems getting their money. And on and on and on. People have shared so many stories of the problems they have every month getting their money that they earned from selling their products on TPT.
Look at the timeline Renee has explained here. Sellers have been asking and now begging for direct deposit this entire time. Instead, investors have been getting their money through the equity firms.
I’ve said this to a few people since I made the decision to deactivate my products. Once you emotionally detach from TPT, you realize what an unhealthy relationship it is. When you look at it from a distance, it’s honestly like an abusive marriage. The abused person begs, makes excuses, accepts bad choices, and generally sticks around because she feels she has no other options – ESPECIALLY financially.
Think about it. I know I’m right.
There are a lot of sellers who now feel trapped by manufactured acquiescence.
I also made this observation in 2021 about the opportunity presented by Teacher’s Dojo when the tax collection issue blew up.
If you want to know what someone fears, look at their actions and not only what they say.
TPT feared the sales tax uprising a few years back because for the first time they saw a viable competitor (Teacher’s Dojo) and saw dozens (hundreds?) of TPT sellers signing up for accounts and adding products. TPT acquiesced on the tax issue because they knew they were losing control. It was a real threat and they knew it.
Now a few more years have passed. Teacher’s Dojo sits unused even though it is a better site with better terms for the sellers. Significantly better. It has everything TPT sellers asked for over and over and over again through the years. Now instead of two healthy marketplaces, more people are entrenched in TPT.
TPT doesn’t feel threatened by the calls for direct deposit. They haven’t felt threatened by it as they’ve sat on that request and ignored it for EIGHT YEARS (while steadily getting THEIR paychecks without disruption every single pay cycle). The fact that they are kicking the can down the road three more weeks until another town hall online meeting where they say they will squeeze it in tells you everything you need to know.
The teacher-sellers think they are an important part of what happens at TPT. They are, in fact, human capital to be used by the equity investors. If some of the sellers leave, it doesn’t matter. The powers that be know that more eager people will come along and start stores.
It’s really sad to watch.
New TPT Exclusivity and AI Requirements
The newest demands are truly egregious. And according to what I’ve read online since the Town Hall last evening, the TPT leadership is allegedly pitting sellers against each other. I say allegedly because I can only go off of what others report, but I’ve seen no one dispute that claim.
One Redditor went through the meeting transcript and offered this outline of the TPT town hall. (It was not a town hall. No questions were allowed and people said it looked like it was either recorded or so scripted no one deviated by even a comma. Some said it was so strange it almost looked like an AI presentation. Whatever it was, there was no Q&A like one would expect with an actual town hall event.)
I went through the transcript of Thursday’s TPT seller town hall. Short version for anyone who missed it.
AI policy:
– Generative AI should not be used to create images or text in resources or listings. They named resource files, covers, thumbnails, preview files, and product descriptions.
– If AI content is already in your store, they want you to replace it with your own. Covers and thumbnails got singled out.
– A report button for low-quality AI is coming in the next few weeks.
– The written policy isn’t out yet. An email, a blog post, and another webinar are coming.What they didn’t answer:
– Clip art you bought from another seller. How would you even know if it’s AI?
– Grammar tools that rewrite whole sentences, Canva’s AI features, Copilot in Word
– Using AI to fact-check your own resources
– How you find out what got flagged, and how you respondExclusive fine print:
– You can check and uncheck the Exclusive box as often as you want until Dec 31. Do nothing and you’re Basic on Jan 1.
– If you join Exclusive and leave after Jan 1, you can’t come back for a full year.
– No new fee when you opt in. Your Premium fee carries over and renews on your usual date.
– Going Basic gets you $5 back for each month left on your Premium year.
– Clip art, fonts, Boom Cards, courses, PD, physical products, and Kindle books can still be sold elsewhere. Digital teaching resources can’t, including inside your own memberships.Descriptions are the part I keep coming back to. Plenty of sellers have used AI for listing copy for years and said so on their own podcasts, and TPT’s own survey says 44% of educators use AI to create resources. Rewriting a whole store’s descriptions by hand, with no list of what’s flagged, is a lot to ask.
What are you doing about your covers and descriptions?
You can read his full summary here: TPT Town Hall Recap: The New Teachers Pay Teachers AI Policy and the Exclusive Seller FAQ.
The AI part is truly insane. I won’t be addressing that here, but what they are proposing makes no sense. I say that as someone who uses AI daily as a tool, but also is thoroughly sick of AI generated covers on everything. I see it both ways. But to completely outlaw it? That’s not a reasonable expectation, especially after sellers have been using it for an extended period of time.
The Future of TPT
Many families depend on income generated from TPT. Some sellers have spent years and untold thousands of dollars building their own websites, memberships, and social media following because it is the wise thing to do as a business owner. Diversification makes sense.
Now, instead of being rewarded for their diligent efforts, they are being subtly painted as the bad guy for not paying their “fair share” on the platform. It sounds like they were portrayed as selfish because they are not all-in on being controlled represented by TPT.
More Lessons Less Planning explained it here:
Mishkin spent most of his time on the Exclusive membership and gave three reasons, adding that there were no others:
1. Fairness. Some sellers support TPT fully, while others pay the same commission and give back far less, which he called an “unfair burden” on the first group. 2. The long-term health of the marketplace. TPT is healthy now, he said, but shows “signs of strain.” 3. Growth. He said TPT has been held back by sellers working at cross-purposes.
He called TPT’s cut “shared expenses” instead of commission. He said it covers about 4% in credit card fees, plus support, fraud prevention, servers, engineering, and marketing that flows back to sellers’ stores. Sellers with private stores and their own subscriptions, he argued, get all of that while sending buyers somewhere else.
This town hall was perhaps the most insulting moment I’ve experienced in my 10 years running a small business. The strategy is obvious: pit sellers against each other, so they don’t turn the blame toward TPT.
Ask yourself if that’s a platform you want to be involved with.
Note this:
He said TPT has been held back by sellers working at cross-purposes.
Working for your own business and family is being portrayed as being disloyal and working against TPT.
Think about that.
You are either all-in on TPT or you are disloyal to the cause.
What is that cause? I assume it is the desire for iXL to completely own the education printables marketplace.
This isn’t about partnering with teacher-sellers as it was in the beginning.
This is about iXL taking over every major education marketplace and expecting the teacher-sellers to fall in line. If they don’t, they pay a massive penalty with each sale.
Sellers Have a Choice
Sellers are faced with a choice.
Again.
So far, TPT has always managed to keep most of the sellers in the fold because of loyalty or because the financial cost was too great.
Maybe this will finally be the last straw?
Maybe the cost of staying is finally too great?
My personal hope?
I hope a critical mass of the top sellers decide to leave and start another selling platform. I would gladly add my products to another platform that took a 10% or 15% cut and allowed people to just sell. I don’t know how likely that is, but that is my hope.
Or will people once again submit to the latest demands of a platform that stopped caring about individual sellers many years ago?
We’ll see.
If any current sellers want to supply more details anonymously, feel free to leave a comment.
Sallie,
I didn’t realize that iXL bought Carson-Dellosa and Evan-Moor in the last two years. After reading the long list of acquired properties, iXL certainly has that monopolistic feel that is all too familiar from other Big Companies we all know and can’t seem to avoid.
How ironic that iXL calls us disloyal when we have smartly diversified our financial interests while it has its finger in so many pots.
This was an informative write-up. Thank you!
Lauren