Shadcnpreset Got Accepted into the Vercel Open Source Program

Introduction

After a few months of building shadcnpreset, I decided to apply to the Vercel Open Source Program. I didn't expect anything to come of it, but figured it was worth a shot. A few days later, I received an email from the Vercel team saying I'd been accepted.

To say it was validating would be an understatement.

For months I'd been building mostly in a vacuum. I could see from Hotjar recordings and GA4 that people were finding the site useful, but meaningful feedback was hard to come by. Like a lot of side projects, you end up wondering whether it's worth continuing to invest your evenings and weekends into something when you don't really know if it's making a difference.

Now, Vercel is effectively sponsoring the development of shadcnpreset.

That makes a lot of sense. shadcn/ui is closely tied to the Vercel ecosystem, and shadcnpreset helps people discover, explore and use shadcn presets, so it ultimately benefits the wider community too.

What does being accepted actually mean?

The headline benefit is the credits.

There are only a couple of requirements. The project needs to remain open source for at least 12 months, and you need to add the Vercel OSS badge to your README—which, to be honest, is a pretty cool badge to have anyway.

I also had to transfer shadcnpreset from my personal Hobby account into a dedicated Vercel OSS team and upgrade it to a Pro plan. Once that's done, the monthly Pro subscription is covered through the program, along with $300 of Vercel credits each month.

The benefits go well beyond Vercel itself.

For example, I've been using Neon as the database for shadcnpreset. As the project has grown—there are now thousands of pages and traffic has been steadily increasing—I eventually hit the limits of the free tier.

Through the OSS Starter Pack, I redeemed $1,000 in Neon credits. That means I can focus on building instead of constantly watching my usage and wondering whether the next feature will push me over the limit.

Neon was the first thing I redeemed, but it's far from the only benefit. The OSS Starter Pack includes offers from a wide range of companies, including:

  • 1Password — Free 1Password Teams account
  • Agora — $100/month in Conversational AI credits for 12 months
  • Auth0 — 1 hour/month of consulting with a Product Advocate
  • Browserbase — 3 months of the Developer Plan
  • Clerk — 50% off the Pro plan for 6 months
  • Daytona.io — $1,000 in compute credits for new users
  • Fern — 3 months of the Basic plan
  • FusionAuth — 12 months free (up to 100,000 users)
  • JetBrains — All Products Pack for 1 year
  • Langfuse — $200/month in credits for 6 months
  • Mintlify — Mintlify Pro account for 1 year
  • Mux — $250/month in credits for 12 months
  • Neon — $1,000 in credits (expires after 1 year)
  • PlanetScale — $1,000 in credits for 12 months
  • Prisma Postgres — $1,000 in credits for 12 months
  • Resend — $1,000/month in credits for 3 months
  • Sanity — Growth plan free for 1 year
  • Sentry — Lifetime plan with generous usage limits
  • Supabase — $300 in credits for Pro plan subscriptions
  • Tembo — $400 in credits (never expires)
  • Tinybird — 80% off any Developer plan for 4 months
  • Unkey — 1 year of any paid plan

Depending on the stack you're using, it's not difficult to save several thousand dollars over the course of a year.

The benefits aren't just financial, either.

Being listed as part of the Vercel Open Source Program gives the project additional visibility, and backlinks from Vercel and the OSS Starter Pack are valuable from an SEO perspective. For a small project trying to grow organically, that kind of authority is difficult to earn.

Just as importantly, being accepted gives the project a level of credibility. It's reassuring to know that a company like Vercel sees enough value in what you're building to support it.

Final thoughts

Ultimately, these costs are a consequence of the stack I've chosen. You could argue they disappear if you build everything with PHP and SQLite 😅.

But if you're building an open source project on the modern TypeScript/Next.js stack—especially one that's already running on Vercel—the Open Source Program is well worth applying for.

Written by Morgan Feeney

I’ve been designing and developing for almost 2 decades.
Read about me, and my work.

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