Templates are great for the first version. They’re how you get a business off a Notion page and into the world. We’ve recommended them to founders more than once.
The cost shows up later — and it’s bigger than the licence fee.
Templates optimise for the wrong audience
Every template you can buy is built to look good in a marketplace screenshot. That’s a different brief than looking right for your customer in their context. A SaaS template carries the visual codes of a SaaS — even when you’re a hospitality brand. A real-estate template carries the codes of real estate — even when you’re an architecture studio that wants to read as editorial.
When the brand sits adjacent to its category instead of inside it, the prospect feels it. They can’t name what’s off, but they bounce.
The conversion gap is real and measurable
We’ve migrated several clients off template stacks. The pattern repeats:
- Funnel diagnostic surfaces a 20-40% drop at the first interaction step
- Most of the loss is on mobile, where templates degrade unevenly
- A small number of UX issues account for most of the leak
- A rebuild fixes them — but so does targeted surgery on the template, if the underlying code is healthy
The honest assessment we offer founders is usually: “this template is 80% there, but the last 20% is where the conversions live, and you can’t get there without owning the code.”
When we’d still recommend a template
- Pre-product-market-fit, when the brand is the experiment
- Validation phase, when the cost of being wrong is higher than the cost of being generic
- Internal tools, where no customer will ever see the surface
Once you’re past those — once the brand is the asset — the template starts charging interest. Pay it down before it compounds.