Who is Raiu?
Notion template creator. Known for Notionjoy and a pay-what-you-want template store.
This page recognises Raiu for what they have contributed to the Notion community. It is written independently, it is not an endorsement, and it does not mean they use thePlus.so.
“I keep running into a template with Raiu's name on it. Who made it, is the free price real, and is the rest of the catalogue worth working through?”
Every product in the Gumroad store is pay-what-you-want with a floor of zero, so the free price is real and always has been. The catalogue runs to ten small, single-purpose templates, and three of them are also listed on Notion's own marketplace.
Every product in Raiu's Gumroad store is priced pay-what-you-want with a floor of zero. Ten templates sit there, carrying more than 300 ratings between them, and none of them has ever required a payment to download. The suggested prices are five or ten dollars. The minimum is nothing.
The X account @heyraiu opened in November 2021 and describes the work in one line: "Certified Notion Creator. Sharing my journey running a one-man template marketplace @notionjoy." Those are two separate jobs. One is making Notion templates. The other is building somewhere for everyone else's templates to be found.
The catalogue itself is deliberately small in scope. A daily standup dashboard for scrum teams. Two budget trackers, one built on the 50/30/20 split and one on 70/20/10. A habit tracker, a lean canvas for founders, a minimal pomodoro timer, a resume page. And an Animedoro dashboard, which swaps the pomodoro break for an episode of whatever you are watching.
Ten weeks in spring 2022, and the whole store exists
The Gumroad post log dates the beginning precisely. On 14 March 2022 a post titled "Launch day!" went out. Six days later came "Manage your finances with ease", the budget trackers. On 25 March, "Create Notion visuals in seconds!" On 5 April, "100+ Notion Resources and Tools". Four product launches inside a month. Each one follows the same shape: a Notion page or a Canva file, a short description of the method it encodes, and an FAQ answering the questions a first-time buyer actually asks. Does this work on the free plan of Notion? Yes, on every product. Can I duplicate it and pass it on? No, the licence is personal, and each person has to take their own copy from the store. How do I get it into my workspace? Duplicate, top right corner. Every single product page closes with the same offer of a direct line: message @heyraiu on Twitter or send an email.
Notionjoy pointed buyers at other people's templates
The @notionjoy account came first, opened in October 2021, a month before the personal one. The marketplace it fronted described its own purpose without embellishment: discover the best free and premium Notion templates and pages available on the market. Creators submitted through a Tally form, and the one listing requirement was that the product already be live on Gumroad, which kept the checkout and the licensing on a platform the seller already controlled. Raiu announced it on 28 May 2022 in a Gumroad post titled "Launching a new Notion marketplace". The X bio never dressed up the scale of the operation, calling it a one-man template marketplace in plain words. The notionjoy.com domain has since lapsed.
The two best-reviewed products in the store are for other makers
Notion Creator Resource Kit carries 67 ratings and Canva Templates for Notion Mockups carries 65, more than any of the actual productivity templates. Neither is a system for organising your life. The Resource Kit is a directory of more than a hundred Notion resources, sorted into avatar makers, icons, communities, design platforms, educational resources, marketplaces, Notion tools, website builders, web extensions and widgets. The free version contains all of them; paying buys future updates. The Canva pack solves the other bottleneck a new template seller hits, which is producing marketplace screenshots that look like someone designed them. Five layouts free and ten paid, each in a light and a dark version, all built from elements that work on Canva's free plan. The product page names its audience directly: non-designer creators and makers.
Three of the templates now live on Notion's own marketplace
The creator profile at notion.com/@raiu-rajamoney opened on 1 September 2022. Minimal pomodoro tracker and 50/30/20 budget tracker went up the same day, and Daily standup dashboard followed on 3 October. Notion files the profile under Standup Meeting Notes, Scrum Board and Meetings, which reflects how much of the catalogue was aimed at teams doing daily check-ins. The standup template is the clearest example of that: three questions to answer each morning, a place to log blockers and assign someone to clear them, and a stated rule that the meeting should run under fifteen minutes. The Notion profile links back out to @heyraiu and to the carrd page, and the Gumroad store still holds the full set of ten with every rating attached.
Why Raiu is on this list
Raiu gave the Notion community ten working templates that anybody could take for free, at a point when the going rate for a decent dashboard was climbing fast. Then Notionjoy gave other creators a place to be listed, with the deliberate design choice of leaving them in control of their own Gumroad checkout. The Resource Kit did the tedious cataloguing nobody wants to do, pulling together the icon sets, widget tools, communities and marketplaces that a new template maker would otherwise collect one link at a time.
We wrote this from public sources and we would rather get it right than get it first. If you are Raiu and something here is wrong, missing, or you would prefer this page did not exist, tell us and we will fix or remove it.
Building something with Notion?
thePlus.so makes the widgets that go inside the page. Free plan, no card.