I sell a Next.js documentation template called DocsKit. A few weeks ago I sat down and pulled the whole marketing homepage, 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 when you try to add a fourth page. The actual docs system, 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, all four components, callout boxes, code blocks, numbered steps, and tabs. It also exports to static HTML, so you can throw it on Vercel, Netlify, wherever.
What you don't get is search, which uses Pagefind and took a while to set up properly, syntax highlighting for code blocks, which uses 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 that's where most of 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.
Demo: https://docskit-free.vercel.app/
Repo: https://github.com/thekitbase/docskit-free
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.
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