What a ready-made Astro theme does for you
Every new Astro site starts with the same chores. Add Tailwind CSS. Turn on MDX. Write the component that prints title, description, canonical, and Open Graph tags. Set up the sitemap. Split content into collections and define the frontmatter fields. Build the header, the footer, the mobile menu, and a 404 page.
None of it is hard. All of it together takes a day or two, and no visitor will ever notice any of it.
The math
Say your time is worth $30 an hour. In our experience, a careful blog setup with decent typography, an article page, and SEO markup takes 15–20 hours. That’s $450–600. Marginalia costs $19.
Building for a client? The difference stays in your margin. Building for yourself? You get a couple of evenings back for the writing, which is why you wanted the site in the first place.
What’s still on you
Copy, photos, and brand colors. The theme’s job is to have the boring parts working by the time you sit down to write: page URLs, meta tags, the mobile layout, a build that passes.
Three questions for any theme
Before you pay, open the demo and the description and check three things.
- Where the settings live. If the site name, links, and colors sit in one file, renaming the site takes a minute. If they’re spread across components, you’ll be grepping the whole project.
- What happens when the config is wrong. A good theme stops the build and tells you which file broke. A bad one quietly ships a broken page.
- Whether you’ll still enjoy writing in it a year from now. Look at how the content collections are set up and which fields a post requires. After a hundred posts, that matters more than button colors.
A screenshot can’t answer any of these, which is why every card in our catalog lists what the theme includes.