The bought half of design work — templates, themes, stock media and type — and the licensing vocabulary that decides what you are actually allowed to do with any of it.
Almost no project is designed entirely from scratch, and almost none should be. The interesting questions are not whether to buy but what buying commits you to: a stock licence is the real purchase rather than the file, royalty-free means something much narrower than it sounds, fonts are licensed separately for print and for the web, and a template is a maintenance commitment wearing a design decision's price tag. The concepts below cover each of those, plus the design system that eventually replaces buying the same thing repeatedly.
Knowing the vocabulary still leaves the buying decision open. Our guide to digital asset marketplaces takes that half: when a subscription pays for itself, when a single purchase is cheaper, and what each model is the wrong answer for.
A stock licence is the contract that defines exactly what you may do with a bought asset — where it may appear, at what scale, for how long, and in whose product — and it, not the download, is the thing you actually purchased.
Royalty-free describes a licence you pay for once and may then use repeatedly without further per-use fees — it says nothing about the price, the exclusivity, or the limits, all of which still apply.
A web template is a pre-built layout and style system you adapt rather than design from scratch — bought as a static set of files, or as a theme that plugs into a CMS and inherits that platform's update cycle.
A design system is a shared, versioned set of components, tokens and rules that a team builds interfaces from — the difference between deciding what a button looks like once, and re-deciding it on every screen.
Font licensing governs where a typeface may be used and by how many people, and it is sold per context — desktop, web, app and broadcast are usually separate permissions, so owning one grants nothing about the others.
