Also launching official bootstrap themes: http://themes.getbootstrap.com/collections/all
Edit: unfortunately though, the 'dashboard' theme is not fully responsive (tables (order history) in mobile view)
Edit: unfortunately though, the 'dashboard' theme is not fully responsive (tables (order history) in mobile view)
- Many themes out there are never updated. I remember some $15-ish Bootstrap themes for 3.1 that were never updated for 3.2, etc
- Many Bootstrap themes out there are non-semantic div hell. Headers wrapped in <div> tags with a class of "header" instead of simply using h1/h2/h3/etc tags. That kind of thing. Often because they were simple ports of themes from other frameworks. Bootstrap isn't always the most semantic thing in the world... but some of the Bootstrap themes you can buy out there are sheer crap.
If these official Bootstrap themes can excel on those two points, they're a bargain.
Also, from their About page at http://themes.getbootstrap.com/pages/about-us
We keep Bootstrap funded and available for everyone. To
date, we have never taken money from investors and have
no corporate sponsorships. All our expenses are paid for
by us through ad revenue on our docs.
It is comparable to the "Multiple Applications License" provided by WrapBootstrap. Still relatively expensive since most Multiple Applications Licenses are under $99.
If this is officially supported by the Bootstrap project - this to me feels like a nuts deal.
(Same in mobile apps. $5 is a steal for a decent app/game, by any direct measure of value. But comparatively, $5 is way more than most apps.)
Here's your problem: you assume it's "the same thing". Just because the $4 thing looks OK doesn't mean it has the same code quality underneath, or that it wasn't stolen (as lots of "premium themes" are).
I've bought themes, both Bootstrap and others, that looked great, were dead cheap, and never got past the first open of the templates in Sublime Text. They were just too much of a disaster to work with.
Knowing that I'm getting top-notch quality is worth the $99 for me, if the themes fit what I'm trying to do. The amount of time saved not undoing someone else's mess is worth much more than $99.
That's not to say a cheaper theme isn't going to be good. I've also bought many that were quite good. I guess the difference here is that you can really trust what you're getting, and not have to rely on user reviews. I believe the Bootstrap people have earned enough trust where I know I'm getting a theme I can easily work with.
This feels (even in alpha) like a HUGE move in the right direction.
If this is for your personal webpage, $99 might be too much. If this is for your business, and $99 can save you more than an hour or two of employee time, it's a steal.
Have you tried to use any of these?
How is their support?
Documentation?
And they are the same thing, templates from bootstrap or from 3rd parties: you get an example site with several pages, pages with building blocks on them, less based customization css on top of bootstrap, documentation which block does what so it's easy to find where to customize e.g. a header color / font.
If you're Seemless, competing with 10 other companies that do identical things, you probably don't want to also look exactly like them. If you're Cloudflare, Heroku, Twitter, Mint, Chase (or even Google), as long as its not hindering improvements to functionality or ergonomics (which it might - but also might not), who cares?
Meanwhile, primarily this is appropriate for small players. If you're in the early stages of building anything, you want to build your core product but have your website still look professional. The correct sentiment here might be: "$99 to have your site look as professional as all the others! Yes please."