An interesting point – I think that’s where a lot of theme shops start out, but certainly from my experience there’s only so far that that scales. If the entire product was built around patterns, though? Could be on to something there…

I think WooThemes in particular have found support costs to be a big problem — hence the changes they made last year, with the switch to only one year of support from the time of purchase.

The most profit’s going to come from selling themes at the profit maximising point, though. As one of the graphs above showed, it’s likely that point comes from selling fewer themes at a higher price.

The data is an educated guess, and I reckon it’s not too far off from what you’d find if you actually did this — and, of course, it will vary depending on individual costs. I’d be very interested to see if anyone tries this!

I should note these figures are entirely made up and I have designed them to give the results I want.

I was wondering where you got the data for these enlightening charts until I read that. Thanks for pointing that out. 😉

I think the most interesting point you make is that less sales for a higher price can mean the same revenue but with less support burden and therefore more profit. That sweet spot must vary depending on the type of theme (some themes must require more support), level of support offered (unlimited sites, one site, one year, lifetime, forums, tickets?), and so on. For one shop it might be $90, for another maybe $50.

I imagine the only way to find the sweet spot is to get your feet wet.

Support costs become a bigger issue when a business is selling a subscription. Some, like WooThemes charge a startup fee plus $25/mo. I guess they’re betting that regular users that are paying monthly become experienced enough to require little support. If not, that $25 could get eaten up pretty quickly.

Maybe the most profit would come from selling themes cheaply, at the greatest possible volume, but with no personal support included?

Right now, I am a solopreneur WordPress developer, whose main selling point is that I can figure out stuff other people can’t, and can explain things to non-techies in ways others can’t.

But this is a self-limiting niche. If every job I do is custom, it’s hard to replicate *patterns* that reduce the work intensity in relation to results achieved. If I can find ways to create results through patterns—without reducing the patterns to things that are *easy* for everyone to do—then I would have a good market.

So, if I sell a product, then I might have to be the senior architect, that gets paid the most to manage that project; the other programmers could get paid less, perhaps. And then the support staff could be trained to recognize and respond to the same patterns again and again in supporting that product. Therefore—in the nature of work—they could be paid a lot less, in fact.

In other words, I would think that the labor costs for support could be significantly lower than those for development.

I just appreciate, that you are starting to think like a businessman about it all .. as it seems that that is probably rare. A very maturing business, eh?

People most often don’t like to look at numbers.