Choosing a theme

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.

Theming removes our call to action

A survey with no theme set ends with a short prompt inviting the respondent to go create their own poll on rifts.to. The moment you set a theme on a survey, that prompt is removed for that survey's respondents. Theming a survey is not just a color change: it also takes our branding off the page you are sharing.

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.