The real cost of a theme

A theme is genuinely cheaper on the day it is bought. That is not marketing; it is arithmetic, and any agency that pretends otherwise is being dishonest about the trade.

The cost arrives later and never appears on an invoice. It is the page that weighs three megabytes because the theme ships features you do not use and cannot remove. It is the layout that is nearly right and cannot be made right. It is the plugin that solves one problem and introduces two, and the second plugin bought to manage the first.

But the real cost is cultural, and it is the one nobody measures. Within a year, people stop asking. Marketing stops proposing the campaign page because the last three were refused. The product team stops describing what it wants and starts describing what it thinks the site can do. A theme quietly resets the ceiling of everyone's ambition, and nobody notices because there is no line item for it.

Custom costs more at the start and less for the rest of the product's life, because there is nothing to fight. That is the whole argument, and it is only worth making for a business that intends to still be changing its website in three years. For a brochure that will never change, buy the theme. We will tell you so.