What Envato changed in July
On July 1, 2026, Envato changed two things at once: it ended marketplace exclusivity, and it put every author on a flat fee. The first is why we can sell directly now. The second changed what a marketplace sale is worth to us, which is why our prices changed. Both are set out in the announcement Envato sent announcement to authors.
Authors now receive 50% of the item price component of the list price. The Author Terms, revised the same day, put it plainly: the fee applies whatever an author sold before and whether or not they sell anywhere else, so there’s no tier left to climb. Count that alongside the buyer fee and the marketplace keeps close to 60% of every sale. Less than half of what you pay reaches the people who build the theme and answer questions about it.
| A $69 sale | Amount |
|---|---|
| You pay | $69 |
| Reaches us | ~$28.50 |
| Marketplace keeps | ~$40.50 |
The theme stays the same
We can’t cut down the product you buy, and we wouldn’t want to. Every ThemeForest customer gets the full theme and its core plugin, the same build we ship to direct customers. Nothing has been taken out of what you already own.
What a ThemeForest purchase no longer includes:
- Support from our team
- One-click dashboard updates
- Our integration plugins, the add-ons for the theme
- Demo designs we release after your purchase
All of it runs through our direct licenses and the Hub. Whatever shipped with your purchase stays yours. Everything above it arrives afterwards, and only on a direct license.
How support works now
We still answer ThemeForest buyers, but not on the terms we used to. Under the old fee those replies were paid for out of the sale; under the new one they barely are, so a marketplace license now carries six months and a single ticket, and those threads are answered after the direct ones. Pretending we could staff the old service at the new fee would only mean answering nobody properly.
A direct license carries more support than a marketplace one. ThemeForest includes six months and one ticket, at the back of the queue. A direct license includes twelve months of premium support from the people who wrote the code, three tickets per activation, and a place ahead of the marketplace threads: half a year longer and answered sooner. Agency licenses get it prioritized on top: those threads go to the front of the queue and answers come back almost immediately.
Everything lands in the Hub
Buying direct gives you an account on hub.jkdevstudio.com, where everything you own sits in one place instead of being spread across a marketplace dashboard. It holds:
- Your licenses and downloads, in one cabinet
- One-click automatic updates
- Documentation, changelogs, and the public roadmap
- Feature requests that reach us directly
- Support from the team that wrote the code
Most marketplaces never build any of it, which is why a marketplace purchase tends to end the moment the download finishes.
Why this works both ways
The old model kept us inside the marketplace’s rules. Outside them we can offer what we couldn’t before: multi-site and agency licensing, faster updates, a direct line for support and roadmap input, and more freedom in how you use what you bought. You get closer to the people building your theme, and we get a business that can keep paying for the work.
We’re still on ThemeForest, and we’re the same team. If you’d rather have the fuller version, with support and updates included, you can buy it directly from us.
Two posts worth reading alongside this one. The first sets a direct license against a marketplace purchase, row by row. The second is the longer view: why Envato made the change, and why it is good news even for the authors it stung.
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