Licence terms

When you buy an item you receive a non-exclusive, perpetual licence to use it in one end product, on these terms. The seller keeps the copyright. You are not buying the work itself, and no ownership passes to you.

Your licence is recorded against your account under My licences, together with the tier you hold and, where the item uses one, a purchase code.

Free items are licensed in exactly the same way. Free is the price, not the absence of terms. See the free items policy.

Regular covers an end product that its users are not charged to access or use. Your own site, a client's brochure site, an internal tool, a portfolio, a marketing page.

Extended covers an end product where users are charged. A paid product, a subscription app, a membership site, or anything where access to the thing the item powers is what somebody is paying for.

A shop selling physical goods is Regular because customers pay for the goods, not for access to the site. A membership site is Extended because access is what they are buying. Where your case sits near that line, ask on the item page before you buy.

A licence covers a single end product. A second site needs a second licence, even if it is the same design for the same client.

These count as the same project

• Your local development copy
• A staging or testing environment
• Copies on several machines while a team builds the same thing
• Rebuilding or migrating that project to a new server

These are separate projects

• A second live site, however similar
• The same design delivered to a second client
• A second app or product built from the same item
• A white-label copy sold or given to somebody else

Build and test as freely as you need. It is launched, separate end products that each require their own licence.

• Use the item in one end product, personal or commercial, under the correct tier
• Modify the item as much as you like to fit what you are building
• Combine it with your own code and with other licensed components
• Deliver the finished end product to a client, and transfer the licence with it
• Keep using it indefinitely, including after support ends
• Download it again and take every update the seller publishes

Modifying an item does not create a new licence, and does not remove the seller's copyright in what remains theirs.

• Resell, redistribute or sublicense the item as a standalone file or product
• Upload it to another marketplace, file host, public repository or sharing site
• Use one licence across several end products
• Remove or alter copyright notices, credits or licence headers in the source
• Present the item, or a lightly modified version of it, as your own original work for sale
• Use it to build a competing marketplace, template store or asset library
• Share your purchase code, or use a code you did not obtain by holding a licence
• Circumvent or disable a licence check the item performs

The line is straightforward: you may build things with the item, and you may not distribute the item itself. What you deliver has to be an end product, not the component in a redistributable form.

Buy the licence for the project you are building, and hand it over with the work. What matters is one project holding one licence, not whose card paid for it.

A licence may be transferred once, to the client the end product was built for, when you hand the project over. Tell them the purchase code is theirs now and record the handover with the project documentation. If they need it under their own account, open a ticket and we will move it.

Five clients means five licences. You cannot buy one licence and reuse it across the client work you take on, even where you never charge separately for the item.

You may move a project from Regular to Extended by buying the Extended licence for the same item. The project is covered from that point on.

Do it before the end product starts charging its users, not once it takes off. There is nothing to reinstall, since the tier is a permission rather than a different download, though you may want to update the item to the new purchase code so its records match.

Both licences remain in your account. Keep the earlier one on record rather than treating it as wasted, since it documents what you operated under before.

Some items ask for a purchase code on installation and verify it with us. The code proves the copy is genuine and tells the seller which tier you hold.

Your codes are in My licences, one per licence. Treat a code like a password: anyone holding it can activate your licence. Never post one in a public comment, a forum, an issue tracker or a screenshot.

Where an item limits activations, rebuilding or moving a site can exhaust them. Ask the seller through item support to reset your activations. If you believe a code has been used by somebody else, tell us and we will look at its activation history.

A licence is perpetual. It does not expire, and it is not a subscription.

Support is separate and does expire, on a window the seller sets per item. When support ends you keep the licence, your downloads and every future update. See the item support policy and the download policy.

An item being withdrawn from sale does not affect a licence already issued.

This page is the standard framework. Sellers set what their Regular and Extended tiers grant for their own item, and those terms are shown on the item page before you buy.

An item may be more permissive or more restrictive than the standard. Where the item page and this document differ, the item page governs for that item, and the difference will be stated there rather than buried.

If the terms on an item are unclear for what you are building, ask in the comments before buying. The answer is public and helps the next person too.

A licence terminates automatically if you breach these terms, in particular by redistributing the item or using one licence across several end products. On termination you must stop using the item and remove it from your projects.

We may revoke licences, withdraw downloads or close accounts where we find deliberate or repeated breaches. Where a breach is inadvertent, buying the licences you actually need normally puts it right, and we would rather that happened than anything else.

Nothing here limits the seller's own rights against infringement of their copyright.

We may update these terms. The date at the top of this page shows when they last changed, and material changes will be announced on the blog.

Licences already issued continue on the terms under which they were issued. A change here does not retrospectively narrow what you already bought.

For questions about this policy, or to report something that breaches it: