Spent $150 on a premium portfolio website template that was a total disaster

I bought this fancy template from a popular site last month because it looked SO clean in the demo. Took me three whole evenings to customize it and the images kept breaking on mobile. Then I found out the coder hid a monthly fee for updates that wasn't in the listing. Anyone else get burned by one of those 'one time purchase' templates that turned out to be a trap?

3 comments

3 Comments

drews554d ago

I bought a Squarespace template instead and it worked perfectly right out of the box.

the_nancy4d ago

Did @drews55 just casually flex on us with a simple solution that worked? Guess I should've skipped the fancy stuff too... Anyway, yeah, these template sites are getting shady with the hidden fees. I spent like four hours one night trying to get a contact form to stop redirecting to a 404 page. Felt like I was paying for the privilege of debugging someone else's half-baked code. At least you learned your lesson earlier than I did, right?

the_drew3d ago

Found out the coder hid a monthly fee" - I mean, did you actually read the terms before buying? Most of these places put that right in the fine print. People just click "agree" without looking. Honestly, $150 for a template is cheap for what you get. You're paying for design work, coding, and support. If you wanted free you could've used a basic WordPress theme. The real issue here is people expecting premium quality for bargain prices. Good templates cost $300+ and the good ones aren't hiding fees. You got what you paid for. And the mobile problem? That's on you for not testing the demo on your phone first. Every decent template site lets you preview on different devices. Sounds like you rushed into a purchase without doing basic homework. Next time read the reviews, check the demo on every device, and read every single line before entering your card info. This isn't the template's fault. It's buyer error. Plain and simple.