I Accidentally Open-Sourced My Paid Product (Do Not Make This Mistake)

I built a SaaS starter kit. I published it to GitHub. I listed it on Gumroad for $49. I got 23 cloners in 6 hours.

Zero sales.

Because the full source code was public. Why would anyone pay $49 for something they can clone for free?

The mistake

I confused "open source marketing" with "giving away the product." These are different things:

Open source marketing: Free content (tutorials, code snippets, example repos) that drives traffic to your paid product.

Giving away the product: Putting the actual deliverable in a public repo.

ShipFast ($199), Supastarter ($249), MakerKit ($299) — they all use private repos. You pay, you get access. The public presence is marketing: screenshots, feature lists, docs.

The fix

1. Made the source code repo private
2. Created a public preview repo — README with features, code snippets, file structure, but NOT the working code
3. Every section ends with a purchase link
4. Gumroad delivers the full zip

The checklist (save this)

Before launching any paid digital product:

• [ ] Is the deliverable behind a paywall?
• [ ] Can someone get full value without paying?
• [ ] Does every public asset funnel TO the paywall, not around it?
• [ ] Would YOU pay for this if the public version existed?

If a developer can clone your repo and ship a product without buying, your business model is broken.

What I am building

LaunchKit is a SaaS starter kit with auth, billing, AI chat, and email. Now properly behind a paywall.

Preview (free) | Get the full code ($49)