About the tally

ThemeTally exists because the website template business is reviewed almost entirely on appearance, and appearance is the one aspect of it a stranger cannot assess for you. What a stranger can do is read the terms, which most buyers never open and which govern everything that happens afterwards.

What we count

Five things, on every source of templates we cover:

• Licence scope. How many finished sites one payment covers, and whether what you build with it may be sold.
• Support obligation. Who has to answer you, for how long, and starting from which date.
• Update behaviour. Whether updates keep arriving once support has lapsed, and who has to be alive for them to arrive at all.
• Bundled components. What arrives inside the template under somebody else's licence, and what happens to it when that chain breaks.
• Non-payment. What keeps running and what may still be started, on the day you stop paying.

Every table on the site is built from these. They were chosen because they have documented answers, the answers differ enormously between sellers, and almost nobody checks them before buying.

How a figure reaches a page

Every number here is read against the seller's own published documentation, written down with the date it was read, and cited on the page it appears on. Where a seller's page would not render for us, we say so in the article and mark the claim as second-hand rather than presenting it as verified.

Three standing refusals follow from that, and they are not negotiable:

1. No template artwork. We do not reproduce, embed, hotlink or closely describe any seller's template designs. Those are their authors' copyrighted work. The swatches and checkerboards on this site are drawn here.
2. No catalogue sizes. "Over 500,000 items", "900+ templates" and their cousins are marketing figures the sellers control, they move constantly, and the web is full of ones quoted years stale. We describe scale in shape and never in digits.
3. No price we cannot stand behind. If the sources disagree and the seller's own page will not settle it, we print no figure and explain the gap. One review here contains no prices at all for exactly this reason.

What we are not

We are not lawyers, this is not legal advice, and licence wording is revised without announcement. Everything published here was accurate against the seller's own documents on the date printed beside it. If a clause has moved since, the seller's page is the authority and ours is the record of what it said.

We are also not a design opinion. Nobody can rank a template's appearance on your behalf, and any list claiming to has ranked something else. What we rank is the deal, and the full count of where to get a website template is where that ranking lives.

How this is paid for

Some links here are partner links and we earn a commission if you start a purchase through one. This has never changed a figure in a table, a score in a licence card, or a decision about which sellers appear at all — and the affiliate disclosure names the sellers who pay, the ones who do not, and the categories we refuse to take money from on principle.

Found a term that has drifted since we read it? Tell the counter. Corrections get made with the date attached, which is the only way a tally is worth keeping.