I’m working on adding a Theme Club to Pro Theme Design. I’ve been asked about it before but have always been put off because of the amount of effort involved in setting one up – however I have now found a nice simple way to do it – so I’m full steam ahead.
One of the things I am thinking about at the moment is the pricing of the theme club and so I thought I would do some research into existing pricing strategies from other theme shops.
WordPress Theme Club?
A WordPress Theme Club is a subscription site that gives subscribers access to all the themes/ products the company makes, plus support for those products, for a yearly fee.
Doing this makes a lot of business sense. When we started selling themes lifetime updates for a single purchase were the standard – but that’s unsustainable. I’m still supporting themes that were purchased for 8 years ago for $79. Thankfully it’s not very often – and it’s great people are still using my themes – but I’ve given them way more than $79 of my time (not to mention that I shared the $79 with Darren, and there were transaction fees, and web hosting, and software… etc).
Enter subscriptions. A yearly payment means that I can afford to spend more time giving people better support. It also gives me the incentive to continue improving existing themes, and not releasing and forgetting.
For users – a theme club can seem like an extra cost – however, we still offer the one-time payment on Pro Theme Design (through Creative Market) and that’s working well. Plus – if they do join the club – it will hopefully give them some confidence that we’ll still be around in 10 years making and supporting the themes.
Requirements
In compiling this list, I focused on theme shops that matched Pro Theme Design (and my plans for it) as closely as possible. So they had to be 100% GPL, and they had to focus on WordPress (not be selling Joomla/ other cms templates). I also focused on the highest prices. Some of these shops have lower priced tiers, but I went for the top one.
Findings
When I started the spreadsheet I had columns for monthly and quarterly payments – assuming most shops would have a monthly option. I was wrong. Very few do. I assume this is because, having a monthly payment means that people could pay for 1 month, download all the themes, and then pay again the following for a single month the following year – getting all the new themes, and all the updates. So it makes perfect sense.
I was also surprised just how many WordPress Theme Shops have a ‘Lifetime’ payment option. That is, they have a single price that will buy you access to all of their themes – forever. Generally it seems to be between 2 and 3 times the yearly subscription fee.
Conclusion
Now I have the data – I still need to work out what to do for Pro Theme Design.
Currently, we have 8 themes for sale on Creative Market so the plan is to start with those and grow the collection over time. I was a little concerned that the number of themes is too small, but since the smallest collection is 10 – I think it will be ok and we have the themes available to let us increase it further in the future.
I have always thought of Pro Theme Design as being on the premium end of the theme scale – certainly in comparison to places like ThemeForest – and the prices will show that, but they won’t be right at the top.
In addition, I hadn’t considered offering a lifetime purchase but, I that’s now something I plan to offer once the Theme Club is set up.
How was it for you? Let me know on BlueSky or Mastodon
Link to this page
Thanks for reading. I'd really appreciate it if you'd link to this page if you mention it in your newsletter or on your blog.
Join the Ninja Sparks Newsletter!