I love Envato Market, and ThemeForest in particular. I spent ten years working on it, from my own account and as lead developer for a lot of other authors. Even when I moved into freelance, I kept coming back to it, every time I needed a theme for a client or a fast, reliable way to stand a project up. So this is not a post written to bury it. It is closer to the opposite.
I want to talk about the things that could have made an author’s work here easier. The things that might have given the marketplace a second wind, pulled authors deeper into their own items, and through that made the whole experience better for customers, and brought more of them in. I want to talk about it knowing most of it will never happen.
The marketplace as it used to be is fading. ThemeForest is somewhere near the end of its active life, and that is not really my opinion, it is in the public numbers, and anyone can go and look for themselves. This is less a roadmap and more a wishlist for a version of Envato that I do not think will ever exist. Here it is anyway.
Real control over pricing, and a way to charge for the ongoing part
Give authors pricing controls per item, a subscription option that works, and honest handling of fees and taxes. The current cut takes more than half of what an author earns, on a scale that no other serious platform in this space asks for. I do not even want to argue about whether it is fair. It just quietly tells authors where they stand, and after a while you start to believe it.
An API that belongs to this decade
A modern API that does CRUD properly. Full interaction with your products through it: updating them, versioning them, richer metadata, all of it. And a license-key system instead of a pointless text file the customer receives at checkout, which is where we have been sitting since about 2005. This alone would make things a hundred times easier for studios like mine, the ones that think about the customer first and about how painless the product feels to use.
A Hub built by one person over six years, by me, now does more on the parts that touch the customer than a company this size has managed to. I do not write that with any pride. I write it because it makes me sad.
Product pages that work like it is not 2010
Room to customize the product page: backlinks, embedded links to documentation and related resources, a wider set of allowed HTML in the description, a clean way to do upsells. The kind of thing startups ship in their first month now. None of it is exotic, it is just missing.
A Hub built by one person now does more on the parts that touch the customer than a company this size has managed to.
A review system that respects the work
There is not much to explain here. Right now, anyone who could not figure out two buttons to install a theme on their server can leave a single star. To contest it you spend days explaining yourself in author support, only to be told the customer is entitled to their opinion. Even when that opinion is simply wrong, and it drags down the item’s conversion because someone did not read.
An interface, a dashboard, and a review flow from this century
A proper dashboard. A review process that is transparent and, at minimum, lets you save a submission as a draft, so an accidental page reload does not erase a form with dozens of fields. Better analytics. A statement that clearly separates positions instead of a spreadsheet soup that looks like a Windows XP screen from the early 2000s. The ability to upload thumbnails and previews at a resolution that does not turn into a blurry mess. All of this exists on other platforms, and has for years.
The things I would want most
These are the two I would trade everything above for. A real line to the customer, some honest way for an author to reach the people who bought from them, instead of a wall the marketplace sits on top of. And a native update channel, so a customer gets a one-click update from their dashboard instead of downloading a ZIP and installing it by hand in 2026. Somewhere in there I would also bring back a place for the community to talk, the way the old forum used to let us compare work and learn from each other. That part we lost, and nothing replaced it.
Why I do not think any of it is coming
Envato, and WordPress as a whole, got comfortable. The monopoly and the long absence of any real alternative let both of them stall, and that is the sad part more than any single missing feature. Meanwhile the Shopifys and Framers of the world walked past these dinosaurs on both technology and ease of use, and they are not looking back.
But small independent studios like mine still try. We still push new things and hand a little more back to the community than we take. If you are reading this and you build things too, I hope you keep doing that.
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