Eighteen templates were finished. Not "mostly finished" — done: each one builds, each one ships a real page, each one has a long preview, copy, and tokens. And not one of them was sellable. The blocker wasn't code. It was one document that said the wrong thing.
The file that was doing the opposite of its job
My repo had a LICENSE.md, written months earlier, from the perspective of someone publishing source:
You may not resell, redistribute, share, or sublicense the template pack … publish the pack on marketplaces (Gumroad, ThemeForest, etc.) …
As a repo license, that's correct. As a buyer license, it's a disaster: a paying customer opens the ZIP, reads "you may not publish this on marketplaces," and reasonably concludes they can't use it for the thing they bought it for. The file wasn't wrong about the rules. It was written for the wrong reader.
Two more holes sat next to it:
- Photos. The demo pages are built on Unsplash photography. Unsplash's license lets you use the photos, but not redistribute them as a competing collection — and a template ZIP is exactly that. Shipping the demo images would have made every sale a small copyright problem.
- Nothing said what was granted. No line saying "you may use this on client sites and charge for it." No line saying "one license, unlimited client projects." The absence of a grant is not a grant.
The uncomfortable part: I'd been treating "the product" as the thing in the ZIP. The ZIP was fine. The product includes the terms.
What the buyer license actually has to say
I wrote LICENSE-BUYER.md as a short, plain document — the kind you can read in ninety seconds and answer "can I use this for a client?" without emailing anyone:
Granted: use on your own and your clients' sites; modify copy, layout, tokens, images, code; charge clients for design, customization, hosting; keep derivative sites online indefinitely; one license, unlimited client projects.
Not granted: reselling or redistributing the pack itself (the ZIP, the source project, or substantially unmodified templates) as a competing template product; uploading it to marketplaces or free template directories; claiming authorship of the original compositions.
Explicitly scoped: photography is not included. The shipped pack contains generated placeholder images; the Unsplash photos in the live demo stay with the demo, and the credit manifest travels with the pack so anyone who swaps in their own Unsplash images keeps the attribution trail intact. Fonts are SIL OFL, self-hosted at build time.
Warranty: as-is. No implied fitness, no support contract hidden in a footer.
Two structural details that mattered more than the wording:
- It's a separate file from the repo license, and the repo license now opens by pointing buyers to it. One file for people reading the source, one for people who paid. Mixing them is how you get a legal document that contradicts itself.
- The build script strips the photos and generates 145 placeholders. The ZIP is 2.97 MB, runs out of the box, and contains nothing that can't be redistributed.
Why this is a product problem, not a legal chore
The temptation is to file licensing under "paperwork, later." But the license is what converts work into inventory. Until it exists:
- You can't list the thing anywhere without lying about what buyers get.
- You can't answer the first support email, because the answer is the license.
- Every day of "I'll write it later" is a day the asset has zero market value despite being finished.
The 18 templates took weeks. The license took forty minutes. The forty minutes is what made the other weeks count.
If you're sitting on a finished asset that isn't selling, check the least glamorous file in the repo first. Mine said "you may not" and I'd stopped reading it.
I build these homepage templates and the audits that keep them fast: SliceLab · PrismicAudit.
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