Alternate Theme Business Models

[small potato]

Let's play pretend.

Pretend selling themes is short-term moola and long-term moola lies in the benefits of free themes.

How do you make money from releasing free WordPress themes?

Obviously, if your plan is sustainable, the theme community would benefit more from your free themes than from commercial themes.

[andreasnrb]

Does the theme have to be GPL?
Does free themes here also mean uploading them to wordpress.org repository?
Does free mean the user can pay with something other than money? Email, registering to become member etc.

"Free" themes could be use to promote other services on your own site. Basically people have to go to your site to get the themes. There should be a very small bar to get the theme/themes. The "price" should be lower than the perceived value of the theme.
So if you provide e-commerce services you provide e-commercy themes or promote e-commerce related products. E-books, courses what not.
Similar to how you get e-books and such. The theme can be a second bonus also.

[andrea_r]

It shows your work. you put a theme out there for free, potential clients can "try before they buy". I like it, I hire you. Whether it is for a paid theme design, code work, consultation, whatever - it's irrelevant. The free theme shows me if you know your stuff.

It's the same thinking as using a blog to make money. the blog itself doesn't make you the money. The stuff you do beyond that is the money maker.

maybe you release a free theme, I like it, then I see you sell ebooks on how to do cool stuff with your theme (build an ecommerce store, for example - think of the Market theme) . Or you upsell me on support or customization, or child themes... or all of the above.

[dstrojny]

We are using a model that allows us to do both:

We release a basic version of our theme for free and offer a paid PRO membership that includes extra features, tutorials, and forum support. This allows our users to "try before they buy" (as andrea_r mentioned) and upgrade to professional support and features when they are ready.

[carlhancock]

The problem with giving away free themes with the hopes of a percentage of those customers like your theme and come to you for consulting, customizations, etc. is simple... it doesn't scale.

Consulting doesn't scale. Selling a product scales.

You can sell that same product over and over again. You can't do that with consulting and customization services. Consulting can also be feast or famine when it comes to income, if you have a solid product it can continue to sell 24/7.

Would you rather work on your own product or work on one offs for customers and be severely limited in how much work you can take on without overloading yourself?

If you want to monetize free themes you would want to do what Jestro is doing by using the free theme to up sell them on a "pro" version of the theme.

[conorp]

Dont know if its possible, but I think it would be cool if you could get 'trial' themes, where all the features work for a week or so, and you then have to pay to keep using it.

[Ryan]

You could create free themes, then create paid plugins which add new functionality to those free themes.

[small potato]

@andreasnrb - It doesn't have to be gpl. But if it is, obviously, it'd be much easier to promote on WordPress official theme gallery and sites like weblogtoolscollection.

the blog itself doesn't make you the money. The stuff you do beyond that is the money maker. - andrea_r

Exactly. When will developers learn to treat free WordPress themes like regular blog linkbaits, get the traffic, then monetize from there?

Sure, it's easier than ever before to sell themes, but no one has really took advantage of the benefits of free WordPress themes. If you consistently release original premium quality themes (not just mod commercial themes for re-release) to take over the free themes community, you can sell:

- info products (ebooks)
- advertising
- theme sponsorship (in a way that doesn't piss off the community)
- theme upgrades
- priority support

You can also copy the Envato network. Use the high traffic site you built by releasing free themes to launch new sites within related niches. Recycle that traffic for more advertising dollars.

@dstrojny - Yea, that's one way to do it. Btw, nice website and themes.

@carl - I agree.

@conorp - I don't know if that's possible :)

From your responses, I think we all agree there are more than one alternative. That doesn't surprise me. What surprises me is no one has combined those methods to really push for making money from free WordPress themes. The free themes community is SO MUCH bigger than commercial themes, yet, no one has taken advantage of that. Weird.

[small potato]

You could create free themes, then create paid plugins which add new functionality to those free themes.

I never thought of that before. I guess that falls under theme upgrades. I've seen people tried something along the lines of theme upgrades before, but I haven't seen anyone create theme upgrades AFTER they've gotten feedback from the users.

[Ryan]

Dont know if its possible, but I think it would be cool if you could get 'trial' themes, where all the features work for a week or so, and you then have to pay to keep using it.

@conorp - I don't know if that's possible :)

It is possible. It would also be possible to remove that limitation from the theme, but I doubt many people would bother.

The simplest way to do it, would be to set the theme so that when it loaded the first time, it stored the installation date in an option then did a check on each subsequent page load to ensure that the difference between the stored date and the actual date wasn't larger than a "week or so".

You could also bury the date somewhere annoyingly hard to find in the WP database, then convolute the code in your theme to the point where no one can be bothered figuring out how to remove it. I wouldn't recommend that though as users tend to get (quite rightly) ticked off at such things.