To me, the 3 main benefits of a premium theme are:

- More features & custom elements
- Usually better designed & tailored for a certain purpose
- Better support & updates

Premium themes allow me to create better looking sites, they include styling/widgets that save me time, and usually have better support so they're more stable and last longer. All considering that you do your research and get a theme backed by a decent user base and respected author.

Premium themes usually have a better support, less limitations, better coding, more options etc.

I was always looking for good free themes until i purchased my first premium license. Since that day I basically stopped using free themes.Of course it depends on the purpose and functions you are looking for.

There is a kind of "intermediate" option. Some offer a membership where you have access to all their themes. I also have one of that and use some of the offered themes for clients. The support is ok, but still way slower than on the "real" premium licenses I have.

Free themes offer mostly little support, especially when it is about modification and integration of scripts, which is fair enough as they are for free.

Hope that helps a bit

DINS

Chaotic Squid hit on some good points. A lot of the premium themes now come with premium "Page Builders" that allow a lot more different layouts, and the ability to make each page unique. This also allows the designer to move and position items much faster than other themes usually.

In most of the times premier theme are provide you more features and custom elements alongwith better support and updates. Premium themes also tend to have better designs than free themes.

For the most part I purchase premium themes because of the support it provides. WordPress is always changing and having that support could mean the difference between a smooth WP update or not.

Free themes provide limited to no support. You get what you pay for. However, I have used free themes from the same company where I've purchased premium themes from. Only because the support is there.

Thanks for all for the input. I haven't been too concerned with support up until now, because I have always been able to figure something out to fix the issue. But, I have only built simple sites, and, I have never generated any real traffic to speak of. If it WAS a high traffic site then I'm sure I would want some help pronto to get it going again. I guess I have just tinkered up to this point, but I may need to start thinking ahead a bit on some things if I ever plan to have any success. I have found a couple good freebies though, with a lot of function to them. But, I have also played with about 75 "not so good" ones. lol

Free themes are also an option for theme developers to validate their approach and product. If the free theme gets popular, theme developers add more features to it and then release a Pro version.

Most Premium theme developers provide instant support however for Free themes you have to depend on support forums and other community based sites.

Free's OK until they stop working....
as many themes are not kept up by the creator
and as WP changes, those themes will eventually not comply with WP
thus stop working properly or at all.

So if you build anything you really want to keep around for a while,
then Premium is the way to go.

Of course I ended up choosing the most expensive one, OP2,
but it's the best IMO, I love it and they are not going anywhere.

Well, there are thousands of WordPress themes which are still available on the internet. it depends on you, which theme you like?

I have more than 10 blogs. I bought FlexSqueeze2 because I wanted each of them to have their own unique look.

I also wanted a theme that was mobile friendly and was easy to configure. This video shows how easy it was to convert my old non mobile friendly websites to friendly ones using the wordpress platform and FlexSqueeze2. https://youtu.be/s1i0St-PMnY

There are some links under that video if you want to see live example as well as a link to the post.

Premium themes provides you cross social sharing feature, Multiple Page Style, Auto Upgrade & Support, Plenty of Widgets, Design bundles, Theme customization, Standard Compliant Coding, SEO