Choosing a theme
Updated 2026-10-10
Sign in and you can apply a preset color palette to any survey at no cost. Setting your own custom pair of colors, instead of picking from the presets, is part of the paid plan.
Preset palettes
Presets are six ready-made color pairs. Applying one to a survey requires an account, but nothing beyond that: it is not gated behind a subscription. If you try to theme a survey while signed out, you will be asked to sign in first, not to upgrade. Holding only the admin link, without ever signing in, is not enough to theme a survey either; theming reads your account, not your admin token.
Custom colors
Setting an exact pair of colors, rather than choosing from the presets, requires an active subscription. This is the one place on rifts.to where a paid feature and a free-with-account feature sit right next to each other, so if the option to enter your own hex values is missing or disabled, that is what you are seeing. Choosing a preset instead works the same way it always did.
What happens if you cancel
A survey keeps the palette it was given even if your subscription later lapses. Custom colors you already applied to a survey stay on that survey; what your subscription controls is whether you can set a new custom pair, not whether an existing one keeps rendering.
Your default palette
Your account remembers the last palette you saved. A new survey you create afterward opens with that palette already applied, so you do not have to repick a look every time. Saving a different palette on one survey updates this default for the next one, not for surveys you already published.
Custom colors remove our call to action
A survey ends with a short prompt inviting the respondent to go create their own poll on rifts.to, and a small "Made with rifts.to" line sits under the form. Both stay on a survey with no theme and on a survey with a preset palette. Setting a custom pair of colors removes them for that survey's respondents, so a page you pay to brand carries your colors and not our call to action.
Where you set a theme
You can pick a theme while building a new survey, or change it afterward from the admin dashboard of a survey you already published. If a survey was created through the API or an MCP client and you did not name a color, it takes your account's remembered default rather than starting untinted; see using the API for how that differs from a survey you build by hand.