I offer free Elementor templates like my Landing Page Templates. I make sure that the work both in a boxed website like my Fast Fix Web Design and in a full width site like my Free Elementor Template Development Site. I don’t offer them with “hooks” to get people to buy other stuff, either from me or others. This is not what others do.
I find that most “free” Elementor templates include a) widgets from some Elementor plugin that you must buy or b) require a fit into a theme that you have have to buy. The result is that when you try to use the template as a stand alone, it’s awful.
I’m not writing this to slam any particular author(s) so I’m not posting examples. Being a WordPress consultant/developer is a tough job because so much of WordPress is built around free and free is a terrible business model. So just like Automattic has many hooks to pull people into paying for things, developers and consultants often need to have them too. I’m a little unique because I don’t need any particular amount of money from my WordPress business. I just need to slowly build it into a reasonable and regular income. Nevertheless, it is really irritating to import a free template and find out that it is crap. I used to go through the same thing with themes which is why I settled on several themes that I had personally tested.
I really don’t have time to test other peoples templates so instead, I’ve just decided to make my own templates to replace any crap ones I find! So watch my free Elementor template pages – I’m going to have a bunch of good ones that replace crap that I’ve found!