40 days in: the business behind Obra shadcn/ui Pro

We turned a free shadcn/ui kit for Figma with 45,000 duplicates into €10,000 in product revenue in the first 40 days. 

It all began with a conversation in May last year. My colleague Robert was convinced we needed a repeatable way to offer strong UI work, and pointed to a shadcn/ui kit he'd bought as a reference.

Looking at it, I wasn't particularly sold on the quality. I tried it, and it bugged me that the kit, while technically sound, was actually a bit useless when trying to do actual design work with it.

It had too many type styles, the way that variables and component properties were set up was not right, and it was missing out on details. It just had too many problems.

As a reaction, I set out to design my own version. When I put my own take on a shadcn/ui kit on Figma Community, it gained traction immediately: within two months the kit received over 5,000 duplicates. This gave me motivation to keep improving it.

I consulted the Obra team for their opinions and we used it in some side projects to improve it. Instead of the kit being built with just my opinion, we changed the kit to fit the needs of multiple designers. Some wanted to use it as a start for a design system. Others wanted to use it for hi-fi wireframing.

For a while I was putting significant time into the kit without any revenue. The theory I had was simple: if we could get the kit popular by being free, the kit’s traction would eventually help us make a name for ourselves and help drive Obra forward.

Now, something changed when a US-based client asked us to customize the kit for them. This led to another project where we customized the kit for a German client. We noticed there was some traction around providing shadcn/ui related design services, which led to creating a specific landing page for customization services.

In the period September ‘25 through February ‘26 — before the Pro launch — the kit drove around €30,000 in client work, all from projects centered around customizing it for different teams.

What particularly pleased me was the dynamic that the kit got better by being used in real-world projects. This made the design kit not a theoretical kit; it was shaped through actual design work.

The CSS export feature we launched earlier this month is a direct iteration of something we did for a client.

Now let's get a bit into how the kit is priced, and how we are doing business-wise.

The numbers: €10k revenue, €8.5k costs

We made around €10,000 from roughly 100 orders in the first 40 days. We gave +-20 licenses away for free to designer friends in the first days.

We use a merchant of record called LemonSqueezy (acquired by Stripe). This is a service that handles the tax aspect of selling a digital product worldwide.

LemonSqueezy takes 5% plus €0.50 per transaction, so the net result is somewhat lower than that headline number. We considered using Polaris and Paddle as a merchant of record, but eventually stuck with LemonSqueezy.

Next to this, we put about 80% of the revenue back into the kit's development, so profit at this moment is limited.

There's four different freelancers and myself working on various parts of the kit and its marketing (each for a limited budget).

The biggest cost is front-end development for the upcoming React blocks feature, and myself investing my own hours in the kit (instead of working on client projects).

License distribution

The kit has four license tiers: Pro Individual, Pro Team, Organization, and Enterprise.

Customers are meant to choose the tier that matches their Figma plan.

Sales vs tiers roughly follows a power curve: the more expensive the plan, the fewer buyers, with the majority concentrated in Pro Individual and Pro Team. Organization licenses account for a small slice, and Enterprise just a handful.

I modelled this pricing structure after what most shadcn/ui kit competitors do. Customers self-select their license based on an honesty policy, and I have no way to verify compliance — but so far, people seem to be choosing correctly. My assumption is that the larger the business, the more careful they tend to be about that kind of thing.

Pricing strategy

Prices are €199 for an individual pro license, €299 for a Team pro license, €599 for Org, and €1,399 for Enterprise — all currently 50% off (See the pricing page for details)

We're using stepped discounts to incentivize early buyers: 75% off at launch (now over), 50% off now (over soon), 25% off in May, and full price from June onward.

We intend for this to create a level of urgency to lock the price for interested customers, but it also locks us in to be committed to the final pricing.

If the final price turns out to be too high, walking it back without being unfair to early customers is difficult — so it's a trade-off I'm watching carefully.

I am convinced that, as we add value, we can drive the prices higher, since the highest tier of the competition is around $3000 USD for Enterprise.

This tier generally includes coded versions of the Pro Blocks, a design to code plugin, and a Figma file.

The stepped discount is tied to a roadmap where we catch up with our competition. We launched the kit with Pro Blocks and custom components, then shipped a design-to-code plugin.

Next up are React blocks (May) and a video academy (June). The idea is that the product becomes more valuable every month. Early adopters lock in through a cheaper price, and get the updates later, thus benefitting from any “risk” they take.

The risk is negligible by the way, as we have a generous 14 days no questions asked refund policy. So far, only 2-3 people asked for a refund.

Internal tooling

I wasn't happy with LemonSqueezy's sales dashboard, so I built my own.

"Obra Lemon Easy" is a SvelteKit app using SveltePlot for charts, built as a responsive PWA so I can check stats on the go. I have to admit it's a bit thrilling to watch sales e-mails come in for a product.

About 95% of it was vibe-coded, though I did put proper access controls in place to prevent unauthorized access.

I also built a separate download center where buyers can access the current and all future versions of the kit.

This came from a lesson learned on an earlier project: if updates aren't easy to push, they won't happen.

The platform also logs who downloaded which version — not critical now, but that data is going to be increasingly useful as the product matures.

The logic of being able to see who uses which version of the kit is inspired by how iOS/Android updates are pushed out.

What's driving traffic

The shadcn subdomain gets about 2,500 unique visitors per month, which is slightly more than the main Obra Studio site.

The free Figma Community kit gets around 1,500 duplicates per week — stable across all of 2026 — with about 45,000 total duplicates accumulated.

That sustained popularity was the main motivation to build a commercial version: even at a 0.1% conversion rate, the numbers make sense as a side business. The free kit is a lead magnet, and that flywheel is already working.

The next step: closing the gap on code

On the Figma and design side, we believe our kit is strong.

The gap is on code — we don't yet have coded versions of our Pro Blocks, and that's where competitors currently have the advantage (they also charge way more than us for that feature)

The first version of the coded Pro Blocks are coming in May. The direction here is to close the gap and keep building.

Some of our competitors have been in the design kit game for many years. I am relatively new to this, but I’m using everything I learned shipping indie side projects over the years. So far, it's working out, and it feels fantastic to have a successful product after trying different things over the years.

Is it sustainable?

If I extrapolate current revenue linearly, and factor in some down periods, it could approach €100k/year. That's probably not realistic, since most sales happen at launch and growth after that depends on consistent marketing and continuous shipping.

Revenue is also not profit; I'm reinvesting most of it back into the product.

That said, the current flywheel is real: revenue funds development time, which improves the product, which drives more sales.

What’s changed is that I can now justify myself spending full work days on the kit.

Overall, I am very curious where things are heading, and excited to continue building the product.