An interesting point was made in the comments of Adii’s latest post, Premium only in name: The state of paid-for WP themes, which is that the extent to which you can consider a theme premium depends on factors other than the theme itself.
Ever since the whole discussion of “what is premium anyway?” started there has been a general agreement that premium themes should come with a degree of support. However good the theme is, if it is something you are paying for (and I am assuming here that premium = paid for) you deserve some help if things start heading south.
The problem with that though, as Adii points out, is that there are free themes that are catching up with, and in some cases passing premium themes in terms of the features they offer. Matt makes the point that this is inevitable with open source. So, when we talk about themes being ‘premium’ are they necessarily any better than good free themes, and if not, is the only thing about them that is premium the support itself?
The end game of all this is the question, is it reasonable to call a theme ‘premium’ if all you are doing is building a free theme and adding support for a cost?
Last week I argued that we need to get rid of the whole concept of ‘premium’ themes because that creates a two tier system which makes it OK to release poor themes because “they were never intended to be premium”. If ‘premium’ itself is already meaningless because it refers to bolt-on services and not the theme itself then perhaps the need is even more urgent than I thought.