I'd say Freddy Lundekvam & his designer have done quite enough to earn whatever "free" envato purchases they may have access to by providing this service to the massive Envato marketplace.

The only problem with this solution (for a designer anyway) is that though there may be an unlimited space for backups of purchases, the backups will obviously be of the latest updated version of the product.

That's the worst thing about losing stuff on Envato. I had my first experience of losing a rather expensive investment I'd made in the premium Wordpress theme "EWA" by Freevision. The cost of the theme (approx $60USD) wasn't the worst part though.

It was the weeks and weeks - months even - of mastering & perfecting the steep learning curve the theme had. Also, approx. 3/4 of my clients' websites were all built using this theme.

Most of them were not happy when I had to tell them about the situation & that (though I wouldn't charge them for the update) I highly recommended they allow me to redesign their sites using an alternative theme.

As EWA was extremely reliant on its own built in infrastructure in order to properly work, it wasn't a simple "change themes" & click "go" situation.

In my case, I more or less had to start over from scratch - which, from a client's perspective didn't make sense (they just saw it as "my site is live and looks great! Why fix somethin' that ain't broke!") ... Additionally, most of them didn't understand the concept of themes, the varying degrees of theme-dependent features, or what all goes into customizing (even pre-built themes) to suit their specific needs... In other words, as far as they were concerned, it appeared to theme that there actually *was* a "change theme and click go" solution.

So this left me with several problems ....

- angry, frustrated, clients who either didn't understand or refused to try and understand the problem & why it must be fixed

-the loss in income due to not feeling like it would be ethical of me to charge my clients for the changes as they hadn't asked for anything new

-the massive loss in time, energy, blood sweat & tears that went into my mastering the theme

There are other issues but those were the big ones. The sudden disappearance of my go-to-theme from Envato had a pretty profound (negative) effect on my web business.

I did learn some valuable lessons from the experience though.. So it wasn't a complete loss.. What were those lessons?

- If a pre-built theme is so complicated that it has a learning curve that takes up months of a designer's time (an experienced Wordpress designer at that), don't use the theme! It's simply not worth the risk & the theme is more than likely overly bloated with built in features you won't ever used ... But that severely slow down site speed nonetheless.

-Take the time to learn a variety of themes & certainly don't rely solely or very close to solely just one theme for all or most of your clients - even if the theme is versatile enough to design completely different sites (and EWA was!) .... If the theme disappears and updates are no longer absilable, it's a fact - an inevitability - eventually the theme will become a huge risk factor for security issues.. And over time, features & sections will begin to break... Ultimately rendering any site using it - more or less useless.

So back to the original topic in discussion here (at least with themes/addons/plugins), while this free solution sounds wonderful, the thing it doesn't provide (and it would be ridiculous to ask for such a feature) is continual security and compatibility updates to resources that have vanished from Envato.

On the other hand, with purchases such as PS actions, LR presets, stock photos, vectors, royalty free music, various print templates, etc., Upvato could prove to be an invaluable asset for heavy Envato users.

I keep regular backups of everything I have anyway, but it would be wonderful to have an Envato-specific cloud backup solution for the hundreds of items I've purchased pver the years.

Sorry for the long post; this is just a topic that had a profound effect on my own business. So it's a topic I tend to ramble on and on about!

Ideally, I need to just do what needs to be done and learn more in depth developing skills so that I can rub my business more effectively.

With the ever-evolving and lightning fast changing and growth of all-things-web, though, it makes it quite difficult to achieve such a thing.

I feel like as soon as I finally mastered (for example) JavaScript and went on to learning the latest php or CSS languages (or whatever else), I'd look back & see that all of my newly mastered Java knowledge had been completely revamped to stay up with current web trends, sending me into an infinite loop of frustration... not to mention the inevitable hit I'd take on my business due to lack of constant attention to my clients.

I don't know what the solution is other than to find a developer I can trust to partner up with to run my business ... But even with that solution, it would require a considerable investment.

And if you're like most freelancers (it seems), especially designers - you're doing very well just to pay the bills as it is.

Am I living the dream by working for myself and running a web design business? Absolutely! It's where my heart is... my passion....

But it's not all roses & butterflies either. Sometimes I wish I'd never gone full-time-web; there are times - a lot of times 1 - when I've found myself dreading a design project - something I NEVER seemed possible - but when you're inundated with work and equally need every dime of revenue generated just to put food on the table? It just takes the joy of design right out of the equation.

I'll step off my rant pedestal now; sorry if I hijacked this thread too much. Feel free to remove it if you'd like.

I do appreciate what Upvato is offering a lot and think it could be an amazing asset to have available for a whole lot or people. So thanks for that; I, for one appreciate it a lot and have no issue at all with the owners of the service having full access to my extensive Envato library in return.