Your Questions About Avada One, Answered

We recently shared the A New Chapter for Avada blog post, introducing Avada One and explaining why our plans changed along the way. Since the announcement, we have spent time reading everything you sent back to us and posted to the Facebook group, etc. The comments, the messages, the long posts, the short ones. We have read all of it.

Some of you are excited. Some of you are worried. Some of you are frustrated, and a few of you are angry. All of those reactions are fair, and we are glad you voiced them. Rather than replying to everyone one by one, we have compiled the most frequently asked questions and concerns and answered them here as plainly as we can. If your question is not covered, it does not mean we missed it, and more answers are coming as things firm up.

We have created a shortened version with just the quick answers and a longer one, if you want the full reasoning behind them.

We understand this completely, and we won’t frame a subscription somehow as a gift. It is a change, and for some of you, it might be unwelcome. Nevertheless, there are profound reasons for the change that will also benefit you.

A one-time purchase pays the team once. Maintaining and improving a platform is never-ending work, and in practice, nobody buys Avada once and expects it to stand still. You expect ongoing development, and rightly so. But that creates a mismatch: the money comes in once while the work has to continue for years. A subscription ties the money coming in to the pace of work going out. That is the actual reason, not a marketing line.

It also helps to be clear that none of this is static or free to run. AI features carry real per-use costs. The servers that deliver prebuilt content cost money to run. Support costs money. Development costs money. Those costs continue every month regardless of when someone bought their license. A subscription aligns with that ongoing reality, and, in particular, AI features are simply not sustainable under a one-time model.

It is also worth remembering that support was never actually free under the old model. On ThemeForest, ongoing support is a separate paid extension available after purchase. So a subscription that already includes updates and support is not adding a cost that did not exist before. For many people, it bundles together things they were already paying for piece by piece, and once full pricing is public, we think the comparison will look a good deal more reasonable than it might feel in the abstract right now.

There is a second point worth sitting with. A lifetime updates promise is only as good as the company’s ability to keep funding them. If we cannot afford to keep building, you still own your lifetime license, but the updates stop anyway. A one-time model quietly carries that risk for everyone. A subscription lets us keep the promise rather than slowly run out of room to keep it, and in the end, that protects both products.

And to be very clear about what is not happening: nothing is being taken away from you. Classic stays a one-time purchase on ThemeForest. Your existing licenses still work. Your client sites are untouched. Nothing is billed to you retroactively. Avada One is a new, separate product, not your existing Avada placed behind a paywall.

For the agencies among you, there is a parallel worth pointing out. Many of you have already moved your own clients away from one-off project fees and onto maintenance retainers, for exactly the same reason we are describing here: a living website is ongoing work, and ongoing work is best matched by ongoing, predictable income on both sides. It is the same principle you already apply in your own businesses. And because a subscription is a clean, recurring line item, it slots naturally into the maintenance plans and quotes you already build for clients, much like hosting or a premium plugin, rather than being a cost you have to absorb yourself.

We saw this fear spreading, sometimes phrased as ‘stop paying or your site dies.’ Plain and simple: this is not true. If an Avada One subscription lapses, the live website continues to work. Visitors see it exactly as before.

What you lose access to is the same set of things you would lose in Avada Classic today if you deactivated a purchase code: product updates, support, and prebuilt content imports. The site itself is not locked or broken. You have a website; it runs, end of story.

This came up a lot from those of you managing many sites. Here is how it works:

The whole idea behind Avada One is a single subscription, not a pile of separate licenses to juggle, and not the old ThemeForest support extension model. If you are an agency, one subscription covers all the site allowances you need. Whoever buys the subscription owns it and holds the account. If you build a site for a client and you want the client to own the subscription, the client buys it and holds the account. If you would rather manage it yourself across all your client work, buy the bundle that fits your number of sites. This is the same way most subscriptions work, including the hosting and premium plugins many of you already pass through to clients.

The bundles are built so that the cost per site drops steeply as you scale. A larger agency bundle costs only a few dollars per site per year, far less than buying and maintaining individual licenses ever did. So no single client site becomes a burden, and the overall value at scale is greater than before.

Licenses are not permanently attached to a single site. If you remove Avada One from one website, you can use that slot on another, as long as your total active installs stay within your subscription’s limit. So moving, retiring, or handing off a site is straightforward.

For agencies, the new OAuth-based registration and the central Dashboard in My Avada are a real practical gain. You connect a site to your account with a login instead of juggling purchase codes, and you see and manage everything in one place. Updates and site management across many projects become simpler than before. Clean handovers, clear ownership, one screen for many sites.

This was one of the deepest concerns we saw, and we take it seriously. Since simple reassurance alone is worth very little, consider our track record with updates. We have always kept Avada up to date, frequently, and have continued to do so over the past several months, during which we have also been working on Avada One. Another release is going out this week. That is not a goodbye tour. Classic continues to get security fixes, bug fixes, and new features. What is true is that the larger new capabilities, the ones built on the new architecture, will live in Avada One. Classic will receive fewer, smaller feature additions than Avada One. We are not going to pretend otherwise.

But there is an important difference between smaller and abandoned. Avada Classic has always been a stable, dependable product, and it will continue to be just that. It will keep working with the sites you have already built. So, we won’t let Avada Classic just silently die. There is no reason to be afraid of that. If the lifetime, one-time model is what you want, you still have it, and we will keep supporting it just as we have throughout the time we have been building Avada One.

There is another angle to consider here. The reason Avada Classic can stay stable is the same reason we built Avada One separately in the first place. Avada One introduces changes deep enough that we cannot guarantee they will leave your existing sites, custom CSS, scripts, and child themes untouched. If we had forced those changes into the product you already use, we would have broken sites. Lots of them. Keeping Classic as its own product is what protects you from that.

We hinted at this in the first post, and many of you, rightly, wanted something concrete. So here is a real commitment, not a hint. The full plans and pricing come closer to launch, but we wanted you to know the shape of it now.

Every existing Avada customer gets 50% off the standard single-site plan: no exceptions, and no conditions on when or how much you bought. If you own Avada, this applies to you.

If you own more than one license, the same 50% applies to all of them. It unlocks a larger version of that plan, one that covers more sites and is matched to the number of licenses you currently own. The more you have built on Avada over the years, the further your recognition scales. So whether you run a single site or manage hundreds, the offer reflects what you have actually invested in Avada.

Or, if you would prefer an AI-enabled plan, you can apply the same recognition there instead, at 25% off, matched to your licenses the same way. The discount is smaller only because that plan includes AI credits, which carry a real ongoing cost on our side.

We will determine your license count using your existing account, so there is nothing for you to dig up or prove manually.

Another fair critique that we want to answer properly. Some of you pointed out that when we asked what mattered most, speed and mobile ranked high, while AI and marketing tools ranked a bit lower, and yet those were part of the headlines.

Two things. First, performance absolutely is a priority for us, and it is a core reason Avada One exists at all. But here we want to be realistic rather than oversell. Fully achieving the performance we want requires major, foundational changes, the kind that simply could not be bolted onto the old architecture. That is exactly what the new foundation is built to enable. You will see improvement in the initial release, but the bigger gains come progressively as we keep building on that foundation. We would rather tell you plainly that this is ongoing work than have you expect a finished, maximally fast product on day one and feel let down. The point of the new architecture is that the ceiling is much higher, and we can keep pushing toward it over time, rather than hitting the wall the old structure imposed.

Second, AI and marketing tools are visible headlines because they are new and easy to point at, but they are additions, not a substitute for the core work. They also sit on top of the platform rather than relying on deeper performance changes, so we can ship them without waiting for that foundational work to be fully complete. The core experience, the builder, the performance, and the workflows are still the center of the product.

For sites that are current and using Avada’s recent tools, yes, you can migrate to Avada One rather than rebuild from scratch. We want to be straight about the limits, though. Because Avada One is built on a new foundation, some legacy features will not carry across. To begin with, that means the legacy layouts from Global Options. It is worth saying that these are not arbitrary removals. Leaving behind older, heavier legacy approaches is part of how the new foundation achieves the performance gains we discussed above. Carrying every old method forward indefinitely is one of the things that held back the previous architecture.

We are not leaving you to sort this out alone. We are actively building migration tools to help move those pieces across as smoothly as possible. At release, we will provide a definitive list of exactly what does and does not carry over, so there are no surprises, and you can plan with full clarity.

This is also why keeping your sites up to date matters. The closer a site is to Avada’s latest building techniques, the smoother any future move will be. That is worth doing for its own sake today, not only as preparation for Avada One.

A few of you asked why we do not sell the one-time Avada Classic directly on our site rather than through ThemeForest. ThemeForest has been Avada Classic’s home for 14 years, and we are going to keep everything about Avada Classic as you are used to it, right where you have always found it.

More to the point, this is mostly a question that answers itself: nothing about Avada Classic changes. There is no downside to you either way. It remains the one-time purchase it has always been, in the same place, fully supported, exactly as you know it. The thing that matters to you- that Avada Classic stays available one time and keeps working- is unchanged.

To those of you weighing whether to stay: we hear you, including those who tell us plainly that a subscription is not for you. We are not going to argue you out of how you feel about it. What we will do is make sure Classic remains a genuine, supported home for the work you have already built, and make sure that if you do try Avada One, the terms are fair and the door back is always open.

Pricing details, launch timing, and more answers will be provided as they become available. Thanks for your feedback. Thanks for your patience.