At the end of July I opened my own theme store and made an offer to everyone who ever bought one of my themes on ThemeForest: bring your purchase code to dan-fisher.dev/migrate and get a free license, updates included. After 16 years and roughly 16,000 sales on ThemeForest, I wanted to know how many of those buyers were still out there.
Thirty days in, I have numbers. Here they are, including the uncomfortable ones.
130
Licenses migrated
78%
Activated on a site
506
Alchemists sites still live
3
Paid licenses
120 licenses in the first 30 days
130 by the time I’m writing this. By theme:
- Alchemists 88
- Escapium 21
- Necromancers 16
- FNT 3
- Voelas 2
Alchemists carrying two thirds of it is no surprise, it’s my oldest and best-selling theme.
Three out of four licenses run a real site
78% of migrated licenses got activated. I expected people to grab a free license and forget about it. Instead, most installed the update and connected it. These are working websites with someone maintaining them, not license collectors.
What happened to the old sites
Before the launch I checked 2,065 domains that had run Alchemists at some point since 2017. 506 still do. A quarter still online after up to nine years is more than I expected, and it says something about how long a club sticks with a site once it works.
Updates drive migrations. Marketing doesn’t.
My weekly migration pace went 15, 12, 7, and I assumed the funnel was draining. Then I shipped a Necromancers update with a WordPress 7.1 fix, hit “notify buyers” on ThemeForest, and the pace went back up to 10. Every migration spike this month maps to a release notification. Social posts, meanwhile, produced brand awareness and almost no migrations. If you have an old buyer base, your update changelog is your best newsletter.
Sales: 3
One lifetime license from a migrated buyer, two annual. That’s the number most people writing posts like this would leave out. The store’s economics don’t depend on month one though. Migrated licenses come up for renewal, and that’s when I’ll learn what this base is worth. What I can already see in the analytics: about half of the people who open the checkout complete it. The bottleneck isn’t the checkout, it’s how few people reach it.
Update, September 7: While this post sat scheduled, the count went from 3 to 6. One buyer converted a free migrated Escapium license, upgraded it to lifetime, then bought a second lifetime license for a second site, all without asking a single question. And the sixth was the one I’d been waiting for: a completely new customer, no ThemeForest history, who found the store on their own and paid full price. The renewals-later bet has its first data points.
So after 30 days: the free side of the offer works, the paid side is a slow burn, and the single most effective marketing channel turned out to be shipping updates. Month two is about exactly that.
If you own one of my themes on ThemeForest, the migration is here: dan-fisher.dev/migrate. It stays free.