Simple question:
The themes available for write.as are… bad.
If I whip up 3-4 good ones (example template), would you be willing to pay ~$59 for all of them?
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I’ll throw in my 2c: I am guessing probably not, seeing as @matt gives away the software (writefreely) for no financial gain. Only his hosting of write.as blogs nets any income, and any themes are community effort. I understand that’s a more than fair price for the effort involved though, and maybe it would help the appeal of the platform for some, so maybe 
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Seems like a good deal to me! But would be curious of everyone’s perspective on it. Would also be happy to promote this / build some extra infrastructure for it – I’d love to see what happens if people had more incentive to develop some nice themes.
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like… a theme marketplace? That could be cool 
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$59? That gives me pause. I’m not sure what the magic number would be, but for $59, I would want something pretty special. At $20, I’m more likely to pop for a theme that’s close to something I want.
But also note that I’m not a typical customer. I’ve done wacky stuff like the No Adblocker Detected test site, so I’m more likely to ink I’ll roll my own (even if I never get a round tuit).
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Yeah, coming from the WP world, $59 for all themes is ridiculously generous, but alas, this is not WordPress and I recognize that 
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I always thought Matt should raise his prices, but that’s his decision to make. Totally get it. Higher prices mean better service. He could maybe more easily hire someone for support, for example. He runs a business, not a charity. I’m all for it.
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I come from WordPress where I had a business sell a plugin (not a theme) for $199/yr – which is an absolute steal considering competing SaaS products were $99/month. Figured a one time payment of $59 for multiple themes would be digestible, but maybe not.
But point taken.
Also, I have a developer that I need to pay. I’d never break even at $20. It’s not necessarily about the money, to be honest, but I also feel compensation is warranted for good work. To that end, Matt should raise the price of write.as.
Yeah. $59 for multiple themes is probably reasonable, but I am a dinosaur. I shipped some shareware in the 90s, and at the time, getting $5 for shareware that made people’s life better every day was a tough sell. Sure, there were some people who were ecstatic to get it at that price, and I probably could’ve charged those people $100 and they would still be happy.
Pricing software is hard. I also worked for Adobe when the internal debates were going on about subscription pricing, and the gulf between people willing to pay $895.00 once and the people who thought $7.99 per month was too much was… large.
We know how that turned out, and I’m probably on the wrong side of things again, but when I retired, I didn’t subscribe to the app I worked on for over a decade. And the company is raking in the dough. [shrug]
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That’s a sweet-looking theme that stands out.
I’m all for people getting paid for their work. But I wonder if this is the place for that. Or, what exactly do people here value and are therefore willing to pay for? I don’t know how many write.as users are willing to pay for premium themes. But then again, I guess there’s only one way to find out.
Beautiful theme, Justin.
Regarding selling themes. In my opinion, I think this could go either way. On one hand, having themes available for Write.as/freely might help it grow. But this is also an alternative to other systems that embraces more of an open-source culture. So even assessing a good price point would be a challenge. It’s not a bad idea, though. And, as mentioned, it might be good for the ecosystem.
One thing I’d like to ask you, is how you went about gathering classes/structures for your theme. There’s no documentation on this, so I just used my developer skills to grab selectors from the code. But there are lots of IDs instead of classes, which makes our CSS overlays messy. For me, having solid documentation on the HTML structure for self-styling would be more in alignment for this community. But of course for those without the necessary skills to design their own themes, having them available in a library would be the right choice.
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I agree with your take, Mark. BTW, your theme looks great too!
The nature of this post is not so much about “making money from selling themes”, it’s about securing write.as’s future. WP started to take off when 3rd party themes came about (being sold). Same with Ghost and other FOSS options. This seems like a direction Write.as would benefit from.
But to your point, there aren’t a lot of resources to do theming very easily. I’m lucky that I have a very talented developer, and even he is struggling at times as we work through it all.
I’ve thought about this several times over the years. I’ve never pulled the trigger b/c I dont think the community here necessarily cares about their theme, more about their words (and I respect that). Likely I wont do anything this time either, as the conversation here seems to confirm this inclination.
Thanks. I didn’t do anything super special with my theme. I simply cleaned some things up and made it a little more inline with my brand.
Totally understand where you’re going, which is why I supported the idea that it might be good for this system. Folks love to customize and make things their own, so having a solid theme library could be really great for the community. Free or paid or both.
I think the biggest challenge is the HTML structure of the core system. I can see a number of things that would need to be improved to make a theme library viable. It takes a lot of CSS to get into any deep customization. And as you know, code efficiency is important. Even a handful of HTML evolutions could dramatically improve our options for theming efficiently.
Whomever your developer is, they did a really good job of commanding the existing HTML. And when I have time I’m going to work on some big evolutions for mine. But theming would have a lot more potential if the HTML was more accessible/flexible. It sounds like it wasn’t built with that being a core consideration, so it makes sense. Preparing your HTML for white label hooks has to be intentional.
All said, I’d say don’t lose hope on the theme world. Your idea is good and has merit. It can’t hurt to throw a theme or two out there to see how folks respond. Even if it has no monetary gain (intentional or otherwise) crowd sourcing our energy for good systems like Write.as benefits all of us.
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This is the truth. Show someone a color-picker and they are giving you money. lol
It might just be that write.as isn’t at the place to support custom theming.
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I’d like to provide a data point and share my thoughts.
Although $59 is a fair price for a one-time theme purchase, and the theme by @justinf is really nice, I wouldn’t buy it anyway. Actually, I wouldn’t install it even if it were free.
My blog uses the default Write.as theme because it’s the best fit for my needs.
It may look spartan and amateur-ish but that’s precisely was I’m looking for. My blog covers my tech projects and interests and I do want it to signal I’m a hobbyist, a passionate but clueless tinkerer, an amateur with little or no design background (which is true, by the way). Part of the reason is also a reaction to overdesigned websites that seem to come from hip studios and which, altough slick and polished, scream “marketing!”, “corporate!”, “True Professional Business, honest!”. This just doesn’t reflect me.
Another concern with third-party themes is keeping them in sync with their platform – rightly – requires maintenance work to track the changes and additions and make sure nothing breaks. But this ongoing work can happen only with a subscription. So I prefer first-party solutions.
Which brings me to money. It’s not that we don’t value good design. We absolutely do, and we are aware quality comes at a price. But it’s just that not all may be able to afford it.
To over-over-oversimplify, my impression is most WordPress users are creators or small businesses who monetize their websites or projects. To them it makes sense to invest in professional tools and services as the costs can be recovered.
Most Write.as and WriteFreely users are instead writers, personal diarists, artists, or hobbyists who have little or no discretionary money to spend for additional tools and services. Let alone subscriptions which, for a hobbyist or someone with no stable income, add up fast and compete with other essential expenses like food and bills.
As for raising Write.as prices, I could sustain an incremental change such a 10-20% raise. But not more.
And I would be suspicious of high price raises for becoming a True Business or growth for its own sake. Besides not being able to afford it as a customer, this has a really bad taste of indie hacking, tech brotherhood, and Big tech.
A valid view, Paolo, and one that I suspect many others share who use write.as. I think the theming needs to be updated, personally, but to your point - it’s not worth the time or financial commitment from an ROI perspective. Honestly, it’s what I’ve always thought, but the conversation has been fun nonetheless. Rest easy: no new themes with corporate greed are coming to write.as 
LOL Anyway, a marketplace for Write.as themese or services would be absolutely fine with me.
I have been thinking on this and have changed my view (amusingly, it seems you have come around to where I started from lol)… but I think you could be right, in that the theming could really help uptake.
At the moment I suspect there are the more nerdy of us frequenting this forum, for the most part; but for more normie users that can just copy and paste a theme and just get blogging on write.as, this might push it as a real viable alternative to the horrible bloated platform that is wordpress (just my opinion; I also absolutely hate the “blocks” thing which feels like a large step backwards).
write.as is a far nicer experience for just blogging in my opinion, and a selection of themes perhaps at whatever price points might help get that across to more folks that might need to catch a glint of that shiny potential.
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I think paid themes for Write.as/WriteFreely is/are a great idea(!) and that the platform would almost certainly benefit as a whole from experienced CSS*JS whittling like yours. As an invested user, I would want that to be profitable for you, of course, but I think starting off with even a cheap bundle is a big risk.
(Context: I don’t know anything about business, really, and have literally never built a single profitable thing on the internet lol)
The most constructive suggestion I can muster:
A single, elegant theme with say 3 color variations and perhaps one clever, rudimentary-but-essential stock+ function for say ~$6?
Something you’d spend just a few hours total on, if that.
The thing with write.as themes is that it’s just CSS and JS, so you need some proficiency in at least how to navigate the code to make changes to colors and all that. Personally, I know how to do this, but I also just plop stuff into ChatGPT and ask it to alter code for me.
Theming is tricky to get working, too, which means if anyone wants to sell themes, they will need to be available for support. $6 per theme wouldn’t be worth it to anyone, even a hobbyist, because the support for the product would be tough because the product itself is tough to use.
I don’t think this will ever come to pass for write.as. And you know, that’s fine. They fit a niche for a specific group of people. Developers can whip up their own thing, or (if you’re like me), just pay a dev to create something unique.
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I would definitely be interested.