I Gave Away the Docs Engine From My Paid Next.js Template

I sell a Next.js documentation template called DocsKit. A few weeks ago I sat down and pulled the whole marketing-homepage-and-search-and-syntax-highlighting stack out of it, kept everything else, and put it on GitHub for free.

Not a demo. Not a 3-page teaser that stops working the moment you try to add a fourth page. The actual docs engine, MIT licensed, clone and go.

I did this mostly because I was annoyed at how most "free tier" templates work. You clone them, poke around for five minutes, hit a wall almost immediately, and the wall is obviously there on purpose. It feels bad even when I'm the one doing the poking. So when I built the free version of mine I just tried to answer one question honestly: what can this thing do without the stuff that actually took me real time to build?

Turns out the answer is: a lot. You get MDX, a sidebar, a table of contents that tracks your scroll position, dark and light mode, and all four of the components - callout boxes, code blocks, numbered steps, tabs. It exports to static HTML so you can throw it on Vercel, Netlify, wherever.

Related template

DocsKit

A complete Next.js docs site with marketing homepage, MDX, full-text search, and syntax highlighting. One purchase, zero recurring fees.

From $39

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What you don't get is the search (that's Pagefind, took a while to wire up properly), syntax highlighting on code blocks (Shiki, same story), and the actual marketing homepage that comes with the paid version. Those are the parts I'd charge for even if I open sourced everything else, because they're the parts where the time went.

If you want to see exactly what's different, that's the nice part about doing it this way - you can just diff the two repos. I'm not going to pretend there's nothing to compare.

git clone https://github.com/thekitbase/docskit-free.git my-docs
cd my-docs
npm install
npm run dev

If it's useful to you as is, great, that was the point. If you outgrow it, the paid version is linked from the repo.