After 12 years of selling web and mobile templates, we are making them all free for everyone

General
1

Hello Webdev community

Back in 2013, I was just a struggling university student with an idea. I spent six months creating my first web template - a simple Bootstrap template called Light Blue with a transparent design and a gradient background, which was quite popular back then. I even borrowed a bit of money from my mom to make it happen. She was not too happy about it.

To my surprise, it worked. I started selling 200 to 300 copies every month, and what started as a side project grew into a business. Customers were not only buying the template; they reached out asking if I could customize it for their projects. That’s how my company started.

Over the next decade, we grew from one template to 28 templates across React, Angular, Vue, Bootstrap, and more. We sold over 20,000 licenses and helped many companies build products with our code. Some of our early team members even went on to start their own businesses.

But the times changed. Templates shifted from being just static designs to dynamic, customizable apps. We found that for every client, we repeated several common tasks like CRUD, authentication, authorization, data sorting, filtering, AI widgets, REST API, email verification, and many others typical for SaaS and data management apps. So we turned our focus to building tools that create these dynamic templates specific to each case. With this shift, we felt it was time to let go of the old and make room for what comes next.

So we decided to open-source our entire library as a farewell to where we began. It feels right to retire our old templates after a decade, proud of having sold up to 20,000 licenses and helped many users kickstart their projects. All 28 of our former premium templates, available for free and fully accessible for anyone who wants to use them, modify them, or build something new. A few even come with Node.js backends to help you get started faster.

Check them out here: https://flatlogic.com/templates
Or jump straight into the code: https://github.com/orgs/flatlogic/repositories?type=all

I would love to hear your thoughts. If you find them helpful, that’s the best feedback.

2

Wow, I bought Light Blue over a decade ago for my company. It’s great to see you all are still around and thriving. Edit: These templates and premade apps are such a generous offer

3

Neely said:
Wow, I bought Light Blue over a decade ago for my company. It’s great to see you all are still around and thriving. Edit: These templates and premade apps are such a generous offer

That’s amazing! We are still here thanks to people like you.

I’m curious, is the app you built with Light Blue still in use? Is it public?

good luck with everything

4

@Asa
No, we shut it down in 2017. That’s just how it goes. You guys had some of the best designs on Themeforest back in 2014.

I just checked out some of your Node backend code, it’s really clean. Plus, your Flatlogic Generator is impressive if it can generate the complete stack and deploy the app and DB end-to-end.

5

Thanks. I hope your mom got her money’s worth.

6

Sorrell said:
Thanks. I hope your mom got her money’s worth.

Haha, she sometimes jokes that I should have just stuck with my corporate job!

7

Oh wow, you chose the MIT license? That’s impressive. You’re a legend

8

Thanks for sharing these templates. It’s great to see contributions to the open-source community.

But why do you list a tailwind tag if you haven’t made a template for it?

Also, the UI looks broken on mobile… The search button overlaps with the tags… That doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence in the templates offered.

9

@Gray
Maybe the dotnet tag wasn’t supposed to be there? When you click it, it says no products available.

10

Charlie said:
@Gray
Maybe the dotnet tag wasn’t supposed to be there? When you click it, it says no products available.

The situation with the Tailwind tag is the same - it’s in the process of being fixed and should be updated in 1 to 2 hours.

Thanks for pointing this out!

11

@Asa
No manual cache refresh?

12

@Gray
I appreciate your comment!

I have removed the Tailwind tag - it should be gone now.

About the mobile experience - I appreciate you reporting it. We focused more on the desktop experience since that was our priority. Unfortunately, we did not see good results with mobile conversion, so we did not prioritize its optimization.

However, all templates are mobile-friendly and should operate well on all devices.

If you find anything else, please let us know - we strive to fix issues quickly!

13

@Asa
The Laravel tag leads to a 404 page.

14

@Asa

Unfortunately, we did not see good results with mobile conversion, so we did not prioritize its optimization.

Maybe it didn’t work for you because it was not working for the customers?

15

@Asa
It’s definitely an interesting choice to prioritize desktop over mobile experience given how important mobile is now.

16

Gracen said:
@Asa
It’s definitely an interesting choice to prioritize desktop over mobile experience given how important mobile is now.

Did you miss the part where they began in 2013 and haven’t stayed up to date?

17

@Eli
I genuinely meant it that their business signals must have been indicating that desktop was more important. Likely because those purchasing templates were likely in office environments using large monitors.

They may have recognized that mobile was growing, but it’s quite tough to change a customer’s perspective, so they allocated resources accordingly. Just an interesting thought.

18

@Asa
The Tailwind tag returns a 404 page.

19

@Asa
Tailwind is still there.

20

@Kiran
Probably just for SEO reasons.