The counting house
A template is a contract with a picture on it
The tally under the picture
Marketplace terms
- One purchase covers1 finished site
- Two sites need2 purchases
- Support, in months6, or 12 at most
- Updates after support endsStill free
We read website template licences so you do not have to find out what yours said at the worst possible moment. Support windows, renewal behaviour, what a “free” theme costs and what survives when you stop paying — counted, dated, and sourced to the seller’s own wording.
Four things you are buying
One end product, not one account
On the big marketplaces a purchase covers a single finished site. Two sites means two purchases, and no tier of licence on sale changes that.
Read the terms →Six months, extendable to twelve
Envato item support runs six months from purchase and tops out at twelve. Updates keep arriving free after it lapses; a human answering you does not.
What lifetime means →Free is a price, not a state
A free template is free to install. What it costs is measured in bundled plugins that lapse, demo content that is not licensed to you, and updates nobody is obliged to ship.
Count the free ones →The design usually stays behind
Content moves between platforms. Templates almost never do, because a template is a platform decision wearing a design decision's clothes.
What you own →Latest in the count
Every entry →
Entry 0012026.09.10TemplateMonster and MonsterONE Review (2026)
A tiered subscription running the same licence shape as its larger rival — and a pricing page we could not pin down well enough to quote. What we can and cannot tell you.
Entry 0022026.09.06Envato Elements Review (2026): The Licence, Read Properly
A subscription that licences per project and stops at the boundary of “completed”. What the terms give you, what lapses, and who the maths actually favours.
Entry 0032026.09.02Template Marketplaces Compared, on Terms Rather Than Catalogue
Four ways of selling the same thing. Which model suits one site, which suits forty, and the single question that sorts them faster than any feature list.
Entry 0042026.08.27When a Template Stops Being Updated
Abandonment has no announcement and no error message. The public signals that appear months before anything breaks, and what to do at each stage.
Entry 0052026.08.22Demo Content, Stock Photos, and the Gap at Launch
The preview is full of photographs that are not included. What the demo import actually gives you, what it withholds, and why the gap shows up on launch day.
Entry 0062026.08.15The Bundled Plugins Inside a Template Are Not Yours
“Includes $200 of premium plugins” is a sublicence with somebody else’s name on it. What lapses, when, and why the failure mode is worse than the software disappearing.
Why this site prints no template screenshots
Every other site in this category shows you the templates. We do not, and it is worth explaining rather than leaving as an eccentricity.
Template designs are their authors' copyrighted work. Reproducing, embedding or hotlinking somebody's layout to illustrate an article about licensing would be a strange thing for a site about licensing to do. So the decoration here is flat colour swatches and a checkerboard — the surface a design tool shows you when nothing has been placed yet — and the substance is the paperwork.
What every picture here is made of
Drawn on this desk
- Mustard, a flat ink
- Navy, the second flat ink
- The empty-canvas checker
- Page layouts invented from those three, not copied from anyone
That constraint turns out to be an advantage. A thumbnail grid can only tell you whether you like the look of something, which you already knew. What it cannot tell you is how many sites your purchase covers, who is obliged to help you and for how long, or what happens to the bundled components when the author moves on. Those have documented answers and they are what we count.
How the counting works
Every figure on this site carries the date it was read and a link to the seller's own page. Anything we could not confirm is either hedged, attributed to whoever claimed it, or left out entirely — and where something has been left out, we say so on the page rather than quietly omitting it.
Two things we will not print. We do not publish catalogue sizes, because those numbers move weekly and are the sellers' to set. And we do not publish a price we could not stand behind, which is why one review on this site deliberately contains no prices at all and says why.
Start with the full ranking of where to get a website template for the shape of the decision, or go straight to template licences explained if you already have a purchase in front of you and want to know what you are agreeing to.