Is shadcn/ui free? Licensing, what's included, and what you still have to build yourself

Short answer: yes. shadcn/ui is completely free and open source under the MIT license. You can use it in personal projects, client work, and commercial products without paying anything, asking permission, or giving attribution. There's no premium tier hiding the good components, no seat limits, and no usage restrictions worth worrying about.

That said, "free" doesn't mean "finished." shadcn/ui gives you components, not a product. This post covers what the license actually allows, what ships in the box, and the parts of a real project that you're still on the hook for.

What the MIT license means in practice

shadcn/ui is published under the MIT license, one of the most permissive open source licenses that exists. In plain terms, you can:

• Use it commercially. SaaS products, client websites, paid apps, internal tools. All fine.
• Modify anything. The whole philosophy of shadcn/ui is that the code is copied into your project, so editing it is the expected workflow, not a violation.
• Ship it without attribution. You don't need a "built with shadcn/ui" credit anywhere, though keeping the license notice in your source is standard practice.
• Sell products built with it. Templates, themes, and full applications are all allowed.

There's no copyleft requirement either. Unlike GPL-licensed code, using shadcn/ui doesn't obligate you to open-source your own project.

The one honest caveat: MIT software comes with no warranty. If a component has a bug that costs you money, that's your problem. For most teams this is a non-issue, but it's worth knowing.

Wait, so how does shadcn make money?

This is the question behind the question, and the answer explains a lot about why the project is structured the way it is. shadcn/ui isn't a freemium product with a paywall waiting at the end. It's a genuinely open project, and its creator now works at Vercel, which sponsors its development. The free thing is really free.

What it created instead is an ecosystem. Because shadcn/ui became the default way to build React interfaces, a market grew around it: Figma kits, premium blocks, templates, and tooling. Those are made by third parties, including us, not by the shadcn/ui project itself.

What's actually included for free

The free package is substantial, and it has grown a lot:

The components. Buttons, forms, dialogs, data tables, charts, sidebars, date pickers, command menus, and dozens more. They're accessible, themeable, and built on solid primitives.

The CLI. npx shadcn@latest add button copies the component source directly into your project. The CLI also handles project scaffolding, presets for switching design systems, and installing components from third-party registries.

The theming system. CSS variables with semantic naming (background, foreground, primary, muted) that make light/dark mode and rebranding straightforward.

Free blocks. The official site includes a set of free blocks: dashboards, login pages, sidebars, and calendars you can install with one command.

Open code. Because components live in your repo, there's no dependency lock-in. You're never waiting on a library maintainer to fix something.

What you still have to build (or buy) yourself

Here's where "free" meets reality. shadcn/ui deliberately stops at the component level, which means a real project still needs:

1. A Figma counterpart. shadcn/ui has no official design kit. If you have designers on the team, they're either redrawing components by hand and drifting out of sync with the code, or using a third-party kit. This is the single biggest gap for teams with a design-to-development workflow.

2. Page-level layouts. The free blocks cover a handful of app patterns, but full marketing sites, e-commerce flows, and complex application screens are on you. Composing 40 components into a polished pricing page or checkout still takes days.

3. A coherent visual identity. The default theme is intentionally neutral. Making it look like your product, with considered color scales, typography, and spacing across light and dark mode, is design work the library can't do for you.

4. Design-to-code translation. Even with a Figma file, someone has to turn those frames into components. Whether that's a developer doing it manually or an AI agent doing it with guidance, the handoff is your workflow to solve.

5. Maintenance discipline. Because components are copied into your repo, updates don't arrive automatically. When shadcn/ui ships improvements, syncing them with your customized versions is a manual process.

None of this is a criticism. It's the design philosophy: shadcn/ui gives you owned, editable building blocks instead of a black-box library. But it's why "free" and "fast to ship" aren't the same thing.

When free is all you need

If you're a solo developer building an app without a separate design phase, the free package is genuinely enough. Install components, tweak the theme variables, compose your pages, ship. Thousands of products run on exactly this.

Free is also the right call for prototypes, internal tools, and learning projects, where polish matters less than speed of iteration.

When it makes sense to pay for the ecosystem

The math changes when any of these are true:

• You work with designers. A maintained Figma kit that mirrors the code 1:1 eliminates the redraw-and-drift problem entirely.
• You build many pages, often. Pre-built Pro Blocks in both Figma and React turn a multi-day landing page into an afternoon of assembly.
• You bill by the project. If a $300 to $700 one-time purchase saves you 20+ hours on the first client project, it has already paid for itself.
• You're adopting AI workflows. Tools like Agent Skills and a Figma plugin that generate clean shadcn/ui code need a structured design system to work from, and that structure is the product.

The pattern across the ecosystem: you're not paying for components, those are free forever. You're paying for the layer on top: the design assets, page-level blocks, and workflow tooling that the open source project intentionally doesn't provide.

Frequently asked questions

Can I use shadcn/ui in commercial and client projects?

Yes. The MIT license explicitly permits commercial use, modification, and distribution with no fees or attribution required.

Is there a paid version of shadcn/ui?

No. The official project has no premium tier. Paid products in this space, like Figma kits, block libraries, and templates, are third-party products built on top of the free library.

Do I have to credit shadcn/ui in my app?

No attribution is required in your shipped product. Keeping the license text in your source code is the conventional courtesy.

Can I sell templates built with shadcn/ui?

Yes, the MIT license allows it. Note that paid third-party products built on shadcn/ui have their own licenses, which usually do restrict redistributing their assets as templates.

Does shadcn/ui include a Figma file?

No, there's no official Figma kit. Teams that need design files use community or commercial kits. That gap is the reason this site exists.

Want the parts the free library doesn't cover? Explore the shadcn/ui kit for Figma, Pro Blocks, and Templates, or start with our free themes and theme generator.