Disclosure: this is a build-in-public write-up about a product we make and sell. It's $5.00 USD. The only product link is below, and I'll say up front that I benefit if you buy it.
We sell small, single-purpose Obsidian vault kits, covering areas like novel writing, personal finance, Notion migration, research and PhD outreach. Each is a zip of plain Markdown templates with its own listing and its own small audience.
This month we merged them into one product, the Obsidian Mega Pack. It has 36 templates, 2 dashboards and 1 sample CSV, 41 files in all with the README and LICENSE, in six numbered folders. Here is what the exercise taught us. None of it is a growth story. We have no sales to report on this product and I won't make any up.
Lesson 1: a bundle is a consistency check
Putting separate kits into one pack forces the question of whether they belong together: do the frontmatter conventions line up, does each folder have a clear job, is anything redundant. A standalone kit never has to answer that. A bundle does, because the buyer sees all of it at once.
If you maintain several related products, treat bundling as an audit of your own conventions, not just a pricing move.
Lesson 2: numbered folders beat clever naming
With 36 templates, discoverability matters more than it did with seven. We settled on six numbered category folders (01-productivity-templates through 06-phd-academia-templates). The numbers fix the sort order in any file browser, and the names say what is inside. No index file, no plugin-generated table of contents. A directory listing is the documentation.
Lesson 3: plain Markdown is a product decision, not a style choice
We could have made the pack fancier. Dataview queries, Templater scripts and generated dashboards all look good in a screenshot. We didn't, for three reasons.
- Nothing to break. Every template is Markdown with YAML frontmatter. No plugin has to stay maintained for your vault to keep working.
- Nothing to trust. Some plugins can run arbitrary scripts. A template pack that needs one is asking you to extend trust you may not want to extend.
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Nothing to learn first. The install uses only Obsidian's core Templates plugin: point the template folder setting at a category folder, and the
{{date}}and{{title}}placeholders fill themselves in.
The two dashboards follow the same rule. They are hand-maintained Markdown rollups with a filled fictional example you copy and clear, not live queries. That is less magical than a Dataview table, but there is nothing in it to break.
The cost is real: you update a rollup by hand. We decided that was an acceptable trade for a pack with no moving parts.
Lesson 4: ship the honest limits with the product
A few packaging calls that were more about honesty than design:
- Finance is a structure, not advice. We say it on the listing and in the files. The sample CSV is entirely fictional.
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The PhD cold-email file ships sanitized. Every personal detail is a
[bracket]placeholder. The thing worth reading is the do and don't rules at the top, and we say so rather than implying the skeleton will write your email. - A personal-use, no-resale license. Use it in your own vaults, don't repackage it. The text is LICENSE.txt in the zip.
We also kept a "who this is not for" list on the blog post: people who want to design everything from scratch, people expecting an automated Notion importer, and deep specialists who'd be better served by a dedicated vault. Breadth costs depth, and 36 templates across six domains can't go as far in one domain as a kit built around it.
Lesson 5: price the bundle once
For the bundle we went with one flat number, $5.00, with no introductory price and no steps to climb. A price you have to explain is a price people bounce on. I can't tell you yet whether that's right, since the product launched today and there's no data.
What we'd do differently
We'd have written the "not for" list before the feature list. It's the part that forced us to be precise about what the pack actually does.
Links
The Gumroad page, if you want the product itself: Obsidian Mega Pack on Gumroad ($5.00 USD, personal-use license). We made it, and we'd welcome critique of the structure choices above.
The full breakdown of all six categories is in the longer write-up on our blog: https://aistacklab2026.blogspot.com/2026/10/best-obsidian-templates-2026-36.html
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