I wish Adam had addressed the impact of competition in a bit more detail.
Shadcn has definitely taken a big chunk, the premium ecosystem around Shadcn is absolutely exploding. I know. I run https://www.shadcnblocks.com and we saw huge month on month growth in revenue for the entire year.
Even with strong headwinds from AI, I expect our revenue to continue increasing throughout 2026.
I sell templates for a living and have used several of these providers.
The main options are
Gumroad - high fees and ugly design, solid system never had issues does most what I need.
Lemon Squeezy - it was very popular until being acquired by stripe. Full of serious bugs, bad support. Lovely design, slightly better fees than Gumroad, but many hidden. Would still use over Gumroad just cause the Gumroad checkout design is so bad it loses sales imo.
Paddle - haven’t used it but I think it’s probably as good as Gumroad or Lemon.
Polar.sh - the trendy new option, most creators abandoning Lemon Squeezy are moving there. Has lots of innovation in features beyond payments such as selling private GitHub access.
All of these platforms are MOR as far as I know, all provide the checkout UI etc. all handle digital asset file delivery. They are perfect for creators selling digital products that want a turn key solution and don’t want to do any development work.
> Lemon Squeezy - it was very popular until being acquired by stripe. Full of serious bugs, bad support. Lovely design, slightly better fees than Gumroad, but many hidden. Would still use over Gumroad just cause the Gumroad checkout design is so bad it loses sales imo.
Curious to read the acquisition made it less popular. Is it due to the concern of Stripe buying it solely as an "extinguish" strategy? Or is it unrelated to the acquisition and just because of the bugs and poor support?
Back when I had an iPhone 6, visiting Fandom sites was completely unusable because it had ads that automatically spammed the app store open. I had to be fast just to close the tab or the app store would get forced open again, regardless of whether I did anything or not.
I needed the info on the wiki page I was using though, and got around the issue by disabling the app store through parental controls.
Apple allowing that app store opening nonsense single-handedly made my decision to go to Android.
I have some fandom wikis that I visit. My adblockers block all the ads and I use Safari's "hide distracting items" feature to block the other annoyances. Makes the site pretty usable but you have to care a lot about the content to bother with it.
I build and sell templates for a living. Like shadcnblocks.com or zerostatic.io. How long do you think I’ve got? It’s seriously an existential threat for me, but my sales don’t seem affected yet.
I specialize in building templates and component libraries. I’ve recently launched https://www.shadcnblocks.com which is a set of 200+ block components for Shadcn UI. The recent growth in popularity of Shadcn UI is extraordinary.
I’m also reworking and relaunched https://www.wickedblocks.dev which has nearly 200 free blocks for Tailwind. We’ll be released some optional premium sets here soon.
Finally we are about to release a set of 3 templates for 11ty at https://www.zerostatic.io where I build niche templates for SSGs. I believe these will be some of the best template available for 11ty and I’m keen to see if this niche has a serviceable market.
I've been developing premium themes for Hugo & Jekyll for many years at https://www.zerostatic.io so I have tried quite a few Git based CMS.
My favourite was Forestry (RIP) which was replaced by TinaCMS which simply didn't solve the same problem and it was for React websites anyway. CloudCannon now offers something similar to Forestry but requires you to host with them. Netlify CMS had potential but always felt poorly built and fragile, it was turned into Decap CMS when Netlify abandoned it. I admit I have not tried Decap, maybe because I never liked Netlify CMS.
Forestry was right in the sweet spot. It had the following.
* Able to be installed "over the top" of a markdown based site at any stage of the project without deep integration into the codebase.
* Does an OK job at inferring content types from folder structure+ssg type and fields from frontmatter, writes config as flat files to git. You can edit these to refine/improve the inital schema.
* no lockin to a specific hosting provided.
> Does an OK job at inferring content types from folder structure+ssg type and fields from frontmatter, writes config as flat files to git. You can edit these to refine/improve the inital schema.
That's what I want to spend some time working on next week as I think the onboarding process is far too difficult right now.
Tina CMS is not only for React websites. It runs well with SSGs such as Hugo, Astro, Gatsby, Jekyll, Remix, 11ty: https://tina.io/docs/frameworks/other/
I’ve seen a lot of indie startups lately that are basically selling faster google indexing then you can get for free using google search console. I guess they are probably using this feature under the hood.
I have a large directory uses affiliate links. I’ve been running it for 1 year now and one of the biggest issues is affiliates changing their links. I was planning on building a basic link checker. I already have a script that is scraping and testing demo urls and gathering screenshots so it would make sense to just extend that. Bernard seems like what I need here but I’m not sure it fits neatly into my stack and I don’t think I would pay for it. If I didn’t already have the script and I was using Wordpress or some no code tool to build the directory then I feel I’d be more likely to use this service
I’ve been involved in the Jamstack, static site generator, template ecosystem for many years. Built At Lightspeed is a template marketplace focused on ssgs and “modern frameworks”
Sales have been entirely from Affiliate sales, mostly via the Lemon Squeezy affiliate program. Its doing about $400usd/month. I recently launched sponsors and the initial interest has been good.
Tailwind and Nextjs are the most popular categories and best sellers. Tailwind (like Bootstrap before it) has a vibrant commercial template ecosystem. I’m seeing a huge uptick in interest in “full stack” boilerplates that have hefty price tags of $100-$400 and I plan to focus on this area more. No code templates for Framer have also exploded.
The site itself relies on Algolia to drive the faceted search results and filters and overall I’ve been happy with it. It’s a bit expensive and the older release of its react hooks library had a lot of edge cases with nextjs, but it’s been improving.
This year I will continue to refine and curate the results, focusing more on content quality and classification the extending the inventory. I recently bumped it from 4000 results to 20000 as an experiment, and this was just by easing back some of the quality filters.
Shadcn has definitely taken a big chunk, the premium ecosystem around Shadcn is absolutely exploding. I know. I run https://www.shadcnblocks.com and we saw huge month on month growth in revenue for the entire year.
Even with strong headwinds from AI, I expect our revenue to continue increasing throughout 2026.