I sell Next.js templates for a living, which made this a slightly odd decision: I just gave away a real, complete piece of one of them for free.

DocsKit is a documentation-site template I sell for $39. A few weeks ago I pulled out everything that makes it a genuinely usable docs site on its own - MDX rendering with real components, dark and light mode, a sidebar and table-of-contents layout - and published it as DocsKit Free, MIT licensed, on GitHub.

Why give part of it away

The honest answer: because it split cleanly. A docs site has a natural line in it that a lot of other template types don't. The engine - rendering MDX, navigating between pages, looking right in dark mode - is infrastructure. The polish - syntax-highlighted code blocks, full-text search, a marketing homepage to sell the thing - is what people are actually paying for.

So the free version isn't a crippled trial with a paywall bolted on. It's the real engine.…