I paid for Dracula back when I could stare at dark mode for hours. Now I use Monokai Pro Light (paid for this too).

Free themes are a dime a dozen.

Paid themes means someone's incentivized to keep working on it and adding icons, &c.

No, paid themes are just passive income for their creators, since they get free advertising from IDE marketplaces and it costs them nothing to run. You can google free vscode theme and get hundreds of literally the same thing.

> and it costs them nothing to run

Assuming that the editor never removes/adds/changes anything then yeah, it's basically free. But since most editors are somewhat of a moving target, it does take a bit of maintenance to make sure everything continues to look right as things update.

The worst part with maintaining a theme/colorscheme is that you can't really rely on automated testing to catch most of the issues, unless you start doing snapshot testing comparing PNGs or similar, and is the biggest time-sink when a new editor version been released.

Over $390k in sales! https://draculatheme.com/open

That seems like a special case since you’re buying into a consistent theme across different apps. If it was just vscode that would be a tough sell.

he's even selling a book lmao

And shirts, hoodies, hats, etc. Wild. :D

I am more curious as to why one would buy the theme and related merch.