Nothing in life is ever free, right? Let’s debate that.
Since the very early days of WooThemes, we’ve always focused on releasing the odd freebie, which has normally been in the form of free themes, icon-sets and more recently our WooTumblog plugin. There’s currently 12 free themes available, from our total collection of 86 themes, which isn’t a bad ratio (one out of about 7 themes are free) we believe. And the beauty of those themes, is that they’ve been released completely free for you guys & girls. Built on the same WooFramework that powers all our themes.
But how much do those themes cost us?
If you consider that we’ve had about 400,000 downloads of our free themes this year already, you’d think that there are quite a few blogs out there running our free themes. And yes, you can rightly point out that this is great publicity for us, and that at least some of these free users have converted to paid customers (that’s part of why we release free themes). But is there perhaps a cost associated to this for us?
We get so many e-mails on a daily basis from users who are trying to get support for our free themes, that either want to modify them, or are simply struggling with one or two features. Whilst the free theme’s documentation is publicly available, that is also unfortunately the only resource that we can commit to users of our free themes. If we had to provide technical support to 400,000 users free of charge, we’d soon go out of business…
And therein lies the “cost” for us; perhaps it is better described as a slight risk… When we end up not answering the questions of our free users, we run the risk of losing them from WooThemes forever. Even though we can try explain our reasoning, and the rationale of our support policy, we still risk alienating them enough to have them never come back to WooThemes. That’s the double-edged sword: support them and run the risk of over-committing time / resources or don’t support them and potentially lose them forever.
So if you have used any of our free themes, always consider the behind-the-scenes considerations, risks and associated costs that we’re faced with offering something for free! 
44 Responses to “The Cost of Free”
I totally have to agree with this. It’s time that people understand that for some things in life it’s better to pay, especially is you want to be professional about it.
In terms of our mindset in posting this, it’s not necessarily about having everyone pay for things… In fact, we love giving stuff away for free.
But there is a few additional considerations to this and most of which goes unnoticed to the masses using our free stuff.
This problem could probably be mitigated by tighter forum restrictions, don’t you think? I’m not saying the implementation itself would be an easy task (maybe it’ll get easier with the bbPress plugin), but couldn’t you simply make the support part of your forums read-only for non-paying members?
Don’t think that’ll solve or change anything really… Plus our business model is focused heavily on support, so we wouldn’t want to compromise on that.
Is it too obvious to offer per incident support as a product add-on for the free themes?
I’m right there with you Erlend. Tbh, I never knew about the support section, as I’ve never had a reason to visit it, but are links to this section included in the backend version of the template? I.e. a , “Need some help? Check out this theme’s documentation here” message bar across the top…or something similar?
Agreed on the forums though, lock ‘em down to paying users (that’s not to say that they’d be any more respectful that non-paying members), but as free user, even reading others’ Q&A’s can be quite helpful.
Great points though here Adii, and thanks for the reminder.
Why not offer paid support for the free theme? Meaning that if someone wants support beyond what you have already provided, they can pay you $30 or something for lifetime support on that theme. When you purchase a theme, you are primarily buying the support and the lifetime updates. Lifetime updates (if any) are free for the free themes so the support would be the only thing they need.
We had this option for free themes before but it didn’t sell well, so we made a business decision to remove it.
I’ve wanted to buy support for a free theme (now on my blog), and I sent a translation for that theme also, but I ended up buying another theme because it was the only way I could see the support forum for the free theme…
And I’m sure I’ll buy more themes, because i’ve fallen in love with your WooFramework
I definitely understand that. If someone is going for a free theme, I’ve found that they often don’t want to pay for support since they didn’t pay for the theme.
I’ve been resorting to paid themes more and more, simply because there’s better support (and documentation) in case I need it.
You’re wrong to complain about this. Customers who throw a tantrum because you won’t give them support for free are precisely the customers you don’t want.
“Our free themes give us great publicity *and* filter out bad customers” is a much better headline.
Hey, good point
Good point, but we weren’t complaining. Instead we’re just trying to share some insight in terms of the things that goes on behind the closed walls of WooHQ. Ultimately all of our users simply sees the decisions in action, but don’t necessarily knows why we make certain decisions.
Hopefully this kind of insight will inspire others, along with being value of them when setting up there businesses.
Oh, I’m sorry, I guess “complain” is a bit too strong. I meant that this is a good thing, so try to look at it from that point of view
I’m one of the ones that first came across WooThemes because of the free themes, and have now became a paying customer. I used a free WooTheme on one site, and loved the customization features. But for me, the Woo Playground is really what got me to finally buy a theme. Getting to tweak Canvas to my liking in the Playground, and then copy the theme export code to my freshly purchased Canvas and have it running in minutes was awesome. The Playground just may be the biggest thing that gets you new customers … hard to say, but for me, it was what got me to buy.
So whether it’s free themes and icons, the playground, or your insightful blog posts, WooThemes sure has a ton of ways to “Woo” new customers
I haven’t heard about playground before, I’ll give it a try.
Woothemes team – I think you need to create some sidebar images that pimp the process Matthew mentions above: Playground Customization -> Export -> My theme.
That process is invaluable and a huge competitive advantage for you guys. Talk it up. It’s a game changer you’re missing out on.
+1 on Pimping the playground. i’ve used it and it is an unquestioned advantage you offer
Thanks for the suggestion; we’ll most definitely look into that!
Wow. Just now heard about Playground. Want to give it a try
Great points. They so need to be made, so it’s great to hear them spoken. I’ve been building themes for clients for a few years. I’ve just spent several weeks of ‘spare’ time upgrading and ironing out issues on one ‘very simple’ theme with the view to getting it up to a standard where it could be submitted to a theme marketplace. I’m no novice, but I’ve been shocked at how long it took, and how much I’d still like to do.
I wonder if people who want free themes really appreciate the work involved in building a soundly coded theme?
I’ve also had to politely avoid getting into a lengthy exchanges with people who ‘just want to ask something about WordPress’. In other words, get in-depth technical assistance for no money. The suggestion of $30 for lifetime support seems laughable. Some of the questions I’ve been asked I wouldn’t care to answer for $30.
Building a good theme takes time and money, and should be valued. When people don’t want to pay for a custom theme, I happily point them towards place such as woothemes for something off the shelf.
Well said.
The actual cost of a free user to us at Carbonmade is between 2 and 3 cents.
Sure, brag about that.
But for us – being a self-hosted product – there’s still the risk of people using our free themes without documentation and us losing them as potential customers as a result. That risk / cost is unquantifiable imo.
Thanks for this insightful post. Several of my friends and I are just starting up, building premium wordpress themes. The info you shared will be more than helpful when we decide to share those freemium ones. We’ll make sure that people understand that with free themes comes no support.
Thanks again
great work keeep it
I think this is more than fair policy. There’s a reason why I only use Premium themes!
Adii if I might suggest, A detail video overview step-by-step on how to setup everything will be 100% success.
After releasing 4 of my themes for free, I had to be smart about support, so I included full video overview with step by step instructions of how to set up everything. I get over 200 downloads /day /theme and only few email questions.
We have many detailed videos on our documentation which is available for free themes on how to setup. But questions go beyond setup and into customization and other support.
Magnus, I think there is a difference/border between support and customization. Support for FREE yes, if they need help to setup images, posts, navigation. But Customization of the existing theme, I think this should be paid feature. This is like re-designing someones website,
Create a section called “Free Support for Free WooThemes”. The content would be the documentation you already have, so no extra work for you there, but the headline would help free users find it faster. Provide plenty of obvious ways to get to this section from the places where free users now go looking for support. Also from the sidebar or other places in the theme itself.
Explain your policy clearly, but frame it positively. I.e., instead of saying what they don’t get, reframe as what they do get. E.g., “We offer the best-documented free themes in the business – important because free themes can’t include support.”
If your freethemium strategy does in fact work for you – if it does help build your business in the ways you mention – then it may be worth investing some resource in the free documentation UX. Have you ever done usability on your documentation? (Sample of one: I look at that stuff and go wtf??)
Looks to me like you first need to get clear about whether freethemium works for you or not. If it does, improve the user experience so free users – your least technical users – have a satisfactory experience with it. If it doesn’t, get rid of it. The open question points to a possible – and possibly quite expensive – liability.
I actually just blogged about this recently – the ‘flaw of the freemium’ model – http://compversions.posterous.com/a-flaw-of-the-freemium-model
You are absolutely right, and many people don’t consider the downside.
So they neglect the support. The problem is, that the free users tend to assume that the support they got while they are free is the same support they will get when they are paid. So that’s kinda tricky.
So companies that want to pursue the freemium model, need to take this into consideration.
I have to believe the benefits outweigh the consequences!
I’ve never visited your support forums – do you have ‘moderators/support’ community members who are able to help? Perhaps allowing them perks for filling that role? Or perhaps having a feature that allows users to see who else is using the theme (ie, ‘Need help? Maybe these blogs using the same theme can help.’) I’m sure there are those using your free themes who also offer for-hire/free services and would love the opportunity to be included in some sort’ve link list if they’re able/willing to offer mild support/discounts for users requesting help with the same theme.
Just my two cents. Keep ‘em rolling out, you provide a great service with incredible themes.
Thomas @ 99niches
Not a bad idea, but one that is unlikely to be viable, purely because less than 1% of users would interact to the extent of helping others. Just your average online interaction statistics / rules in play there.
Unfortunately true. Maybe have to offer credits towards premium themes if you help so many people or something. Who knows.
We have taken advantage of your free themes, but not to use for our business. We were able to setup a private site (for our use only) to see how your themes are different from other companies that we are considering. We went from a Microsoft Frontpage website to a HTML website. Then, we hired a professional and they introduced us to WordPress. So we started looking for themes, because we couldn’t afford the $5,000 price tag of setting up a customized theme for us. So we hired a freelance designer to alter a current theme. We purchased several themes from a variety of companies but your free theme (The Morning After) gave us some new ideas. We aren’t using that theme and we still are looking for our next long-term theme. We check your website often and hope to find something the we all like. If you ever decide to forgo the free theme option, then I would suggest to make a theme that is just usable for people to see how your themes work. If possible it would be great to setup a series of video’s showing each feature and how it works. You guys are GREAT and we love the honesty the openness you guys have.
While we are talking about free stuff, how about a new coupon? I want to buy Postcard for FavTrip but am waiting for a coupon!
Drop us a mail and we’ll see what we can do to help.
Great work! I’m sure you have done your homework in this article.
Trackbacks/Pingbacks