Why I started this
i kept buying wordpress themes for client projects and noticing the same problems. the headlines never sat right. the line lengths were always too long or too tight. the dark mode was an afterthought. the changelog was either empty or full of "various improvements." someone had clearly built the theme, then handed it to a marketing team to brand it, and the marketing won.
i started building one-off themes for my own clients to avoid all that. they kept asking if i'd put them up for sale. for a long time i said no, because shipping a theme to two clients is one thing and shipping it to two thousand is another. then i shipped one anyway, and the questions about license and updates and support did not, in fact, eat my whole month. so the shop opened.
themebench is the version of a theme shop i wanted as a customer. small catalog. opinionated about type. one human reading the inbox. if a theme is in the catalog, it's because i'd put it on one of my own client sites without flinching.
What "hand-crafted" actually means here
every theme is built and shipped by me. that sounds like a marketing line, so let me be specific about what it actually means in practice.
it means the type ramp is a deliberate choice for each theme, not a copy from the last one. it means the dark variant gets the same care as the light one. it means when i find a bug in the spacing of a block on a tuesday, all 32 themes get the fix on the same release, not "scheduled for the next milestone." it also means i ship slower than larger shops. there's no roadmap board with 80 cards. there are six things i'm working on this month, written down on paper, and i finish them before i start more.
it also means every theme gets tested the way a real site gets tested. install a fresh wordpress, install the popular plugins (yoast, woocommerce, wpforms, advanced custom fields), activate the theme, click around for an hour, then open the lighthouse panel and read the bad news honestly. fixes go into a list, the list gets cleared before the theme ships. if a plugin combination breaks something, either the theme adapts or the docs warn the buyer. the goal is that the theme arrives finished.
the trade-off is honest. you get a smaller catalog, but the catalog is finished. nothing in it is half a theme. nothing in it is "v0.9, demo content only." if a theme is listed, it works, in production, on a real site, with woocommerce on and rtl on and the accessibility checker quiet.
The roadmap (such as it is)
i don't keep a public roadmap. i keep a list of the next three themes and a list of fixes for the existing 32, and the existing 32 always come first. that is the whole policy.
the next three are usually obvious to me a season in advance. right now they are a long-form essay theme, a directory theme for niche listings, and a teaching theme with a syllabus post type. whether they ship is a question of whether they get good enough to put in the catalog. one of them probably gets cut. that's the cost of an opinionated catalog: some ideas die in private rather than shipping half-built.
the long-term commitment is the only one that matters: every theme you buy keeps getting updates while i'm still building. if i ever stop, you'll get an email, and the last version stays yours, with source files. no surprise paywall, no migration to a "v2" shop. one shop, one version of every theme, indefinitely.
Why I won't add a subscription tier
a few customers have asked, kindly, whether i'd ever offer a monthly plan. the answer is no, and it stays no. subscription pricing makes sense for software that costs me money every month to keep running. a wordpress theme is not that. once a theme is built, the only ongoing cost is my time to fix things and add improvements, and that work is funded by new buyers showing up, not by old buyers paying me again for the same files they already have. the moment i introduce a subscription, i become a person who has to invent reasons for the same customer to keep paying, and that incentive ruins the work. one-time payment, lifetime updates, and if the math eventually stops working, i'll tell you in writing.
the closest thing to a subscription on offer is the agency license, and even that is one-time. it covers unlimited sites for studios that ship a lot of work, because at that volume the per-theme math gets silly. anyone smaller than an agency is better off picking the themes they actually need, paying once per seat, and never thinking about the receipt again. that's the whole pricing philosophy. it fits on a sticky note.