Why the Obra shadcn/ui kit is going commercial

I’ve been preparing for the commercial release of the Obra shadcn/ui kit, and I wanted to share the thinking behind this decision.

My hope is straightforward: get some sales and funnel the money from those initial sales back into kit upgrades, creating a cycle of improvement.

How we got here

Up until now, I’ve been funding improvements to the kit myself — either by paying freelancers or just spending my own time on it. Hundreds of hours and late nights have been spent on this project.

We launched customization services in December, and so far we’ve had a few great projects where we customized our own kit for clients. That part has been going well.

Recently, we added an estimate module to our website if you are curious to learn what it costs to get our shadcn/ui kit customized to your brand.

Now lately, a budget and people problem surfaced: the people who know how to improve the kit itself are not the same people who are good at taking a brand and applying the kit to it. These are two fundamentally different design tasks.

The economics don’t work

The customization projects make agency-type money — there’s a possible margin on the project if things go well. But we have to find the right designers who can execute the projects professionally; and obviously pay them for their work. Any time spent on improving the kit itself within the customization projects eats into that margin.

We realized we can’t afford to do both: provide a free kit and keep improving it based on what we learn from client projects.

There’s also a technical dimension. In Figma, it’s not that easy to provide “global updates.” Some changes require a ton of manual work — or writing custom plugins — depending on what you need to change.

We’re 2 people in the team with these skills but once again, things either get time-intensive for me or expensive for the project fast (when relying on a freelancer).

A bet on the future

The switch to a commercial model is really a bet on the future of the kit. Without it, the kit probably doesn’t have much of a future, since it doesn’t make sense to keep funneling money into it indefinitely.

The math of a paid model is encouraging. If just one enterprise client or two org-level clients buy the kit, that already gives me enough budget to hire a freelancer for around 15 hours to fix bugs and ship improvements.

If we have enough sales overall, with muyltiple monthly purchases of the kit, my hope is to eventually run a part of Obra Studio, the agency behind this kit, as a product team.

We understand a paid product comes with new expectations and are ready to tackle those. When we look at the quality of competing kits, we feel confident we are 100% there to charge for what we provide.

Here’ s the cycle I want to create: sales funds kit improvements, improvements drive more value, and more value drives more sales. This is the way.