The problem with using free themes to get custom work is that the work doesn’t scale
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.
Carl Hancock then argues that this doesn’t scale:
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.
The next bit seems relevant to what Darren Hoyt and I are trying to do with WP Questions.
developdaly said:
What I don’t see as a “real” option is just selling themes. I totally agree that the “big theme shops” are viable businesses because their main asset is support. All I was saying was that if they didn’t offer support their business would likely disappear after the themes were distributed for free by someone else.
To which Andrea_r responded:
Totally in agreement there, I think we’re coming at it from two ends to the same conclusion. There’s absolutely no point in *just* selling a theme. Because the code can & will be redistributed, GPL or not.
This suggests that WP Questions, to the extent that it soaks up support dollars, is either in alliance with the plugin and theme developers or it is in direct competition with them. And we do not want to be in direct competition with them.