DreamTemplate Price Scam
You may have noticed that the prices on DreamTemplate are incredibly inflated. As of today, 29 April when I visited, Website templates were listed at USD 2400 and Flash Template priced at USD 3500.
They are not even unique which means that after you pay thousands of dollars for a template, someone else could come along and use it for their site, negatively impacting your brand’s credibility.
That’s assuming you’re not ripped off by DreamTemplate’s 30-Day unconditional Refund policy, which, from my personal experience, they empathically do *not* honor.
As most people already know, nowadays you can get professional, unique websites designed for as low as $50 by bidding on freelance sites like rentacoder.com or scriptlance.com. For around $300, you can get a custom design by an experienced, reputable designer.
The best part is that you don’t have to worry about being ripped off. The money is held in escrow by the website until you’re happy with the work.
This leads me to mention DreamTemplate’s overinflated Price Scam. As an internet newbie, I was overwhelmed by the bonanza of high quality websites I saw and what I thought was *very* inexpensive membership fee. Little did I know, there is an ugly story behind their collection.
In DreamTemplate took the *free* open source templates that have been distributed for years, lightly modified them and offered them as *unique* templates at $400-600 to customers. This was extremely misleading if not outright fraud. Because customers could pay hundreds of dollars for the websites only to discover that half a million people on the net have already downloaded the same template for years, for free.
This caused a storm of controversy among the group of designers who discovered DreamTemplate was deceiving ignorant customers with their free open-source designs. (As seen from a blog post dated 13 September by Andreas Viklund. Http://andreasviklund.com/blog/webdesign/business-ethics) As the blog post notes – Andreas contacted DreamTemplate several times and did not get a response for weeks. An experience consonant with mine although two years later.
The controversy caused DreamTemplate to stop selling their templates as “unique” and label them as open source templates they really are.
I recommend that people avoid DreamTemplates for ethical reasons. These unscrupulous business people know exactly what they are doing. Even their price and product offers are misleading. Don’t be a fool like me, I trusted Telson to process my Refund request made only 3 days later and wasted hours writing 6 emails from 21 Jan – 29 April.
Absolutely *no* progress was made until I contacted the relevant authorities, cancelled my previous credit card and involved my bank in a chargeback dispute.
Please - just be aware about what you are getting into when you sign up for one of DreamTemplates paid services.
Affiliates – please be aware that if you promote businesses with poor business ethics, it will reflect badly upon you as well. I hope my experience will be helpful in factoring the commission vs reputation equation.
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