Every time I read one of these things I feel dumber. Who buys stuff like Bootstrap templates? I feel like most of that kind of stuff is free or not hard to replicate and I don't get why people spend money on it.
If you are a mid range developer, your per-hour consulting fee could be $200 to $300. A typical Bootstrap template for purchase is ~$30 in my experience, so effectively 10 to 15min of your time.
If you can mark up a good template that quickly (all the various pages, color combos, etc you get) -- you're really good and your bill rate should be much higher :-)
If not, it is better to purchase than waste precious time.
If you want to learn or enjoy the art, that is a separate story, and you should absolutely do it yourself.
For me, i'm primary a back-end and algo developer, so I like to find something that works well, buy it, and move onto working the engines.
Even if it is 10$/hour, and a template is 40$, you will spend more than 4 hours just to choose colors/fonts and design ideas. Then you will spend days/weeks to plan, implement and test on tens of devices (phones, tablets, tvs, desktops etc).
The Bootstrap Templates are just 1 part of what we deliver. We also have React, Vue, Angular, Laravel, React Native, Node.js, Photoshop, Sketch, Figma, Adobe XD in our products lists. So if you take into consideration an agency who will deliver for his client a website + web app and they buy a "React + React Native + Sketch" combo from us and pay let's say 150$, that will be over 5.000$ for them if they have to build it from scratch. Also don't forget that we spend many months on building and testing our products on many devices (phones, tablets, tvs, desktops etc) Hope this makes sense.
Yes and no. Mostly yes, this is marketing, but is not really disguised. It explicitly lists writing such articles as a form of marketing as part of their strategy.
That's right, it's part of the strategy but it's not generating revenue if you think of this from the marketing perspective. If we take into consideration the amount that we made based on the traffic that we got from these articles, it will be around 0.2% of the general revenue in 1 year (~2.000$ of $1M). Me, as the co-founder, I've spent many weeks planning, writing and gathering information to write these articles.
Time is money, sometimes the cost to purchase somethings COTS is a no brainer (especially if it offers support!).
Bootstrap has the other advantage of being pretty well designed so if your template isn't quite right they are easy to change, something which I've found to be rare with other COTS solutions.
