UI code should be free

dashboardcn will never have a paid tier. Not a Pro plan, not a lifetime license, not a "premium blocks" page. Every component that exists or will exist is MIT, and you can do whatever you want with it, including selling it. This post is why.

The gap that started this#

shadcn/ui changed what people expect from UI components. The code is free, it is yours, and it lives in your repo where you can read it and change it. For buttons, dialogs, and forms, that expectation is now the default.

It did not extend to dashboards. Go looking for a KPI card with a sparkline, a funnel, or a chart card with a period switcher, and the polished options are behind a checkout page. You can have a free sample, and the twenty components you actually need are in the Pro tier, licensed per developer, per year, with a clause that says you cannot redistribute the source. The one thing that made shadcn/ui good, that the code is yours, gets sold back to you.

Why paying for UI is a bad deal#

UI components are not hard to write. That sounds dismissive but it is the point. A KPI card is a hundred lines. A trend chart is a wrapper around Recharts. The value is not in any one of them, it is in having them consistent, tested, and composed into cards, and that value evaporates the moment the code is locked.

• You cannot share it. Paid UI licenses forbid publishing the source. Your open source side project, your starter template, your blog post with the code in it, all off the table.
• You cannot fork it. When the vendor moves on, and UI kits move on constantly, you are left with a snapshot you are not allowed to redistribute, and no community to keep it alive.
• It compounds. A per-developer license on a growing team is a tax on hiring, for a folder of TSX files.
• It makes the ecosystem worse. Every component sold behind a license is one that does not get copied, improved, and copied again. shadcn/ui got good because everyone could see and build on everyone else's version.

What free actually means here#

MIT, no exceptions. Every component and block is in the public registry, and the source is on GitHub. You can use it in commercial products, put it in a template you sell, or build something that competes with this site. We would rather that happen than have a single component behind a paywall.

There is also no account, no license key, and no email gate. The install command on every page works the first time you paste it.

How it stays free#

By staying small. dashboardcn is a registry, not a company. It does not ship a design system, an app shell, or a Figma file, because shadcn/ui and its ecosystem already cover those. It ships the data components a dashboard needs and the cards that combine them, and it is cheap to maintain because the code is simple and other people can fix it.

If you have a dashboard component you wrote and would like more people to use, open a pull request. If you are choosing between this and a paid kit, we wrote up how the two compare honestly. And if you just want the components, start here.