Obra Autodocs is now free and open source

Hi everyone,

After some consideration we have made Obra Autodocs free to use.

Furthermore, we are sharing the source code for other teams to either improve upon the plugin or customize it to their own needs.

We don't think it makes sense to make this a paid product any more. There are some underlying reasons behind this.

Remove usage friction

When people purchase our Obra shadcn/ui Figma kit, we supply them with a code to use Obra Autodocs for free.

From the customer's perspective, when working with a team, now they have to distribute both the kit internally, and the plugin.

It's much easier for everyone when they can just run the plugin at will and not encounter any issues.

Revenue is low vs. our other product

The revenue from Autodocs is extremely low when compared to our shadcn/ui kit.

We are very much focused on our main product, and Autodocs being free lets us keep that focus where it matters most.

It's not popular yet

We sit at only 124 users for the Autodocs plugin. While I believe we have a better product than the competition, there's less people actually using Autodocs than people who have purchased a license to Obra shadcn/ui.

We believe that by making it free we can drive its popularity forward.

Sharing the code makes other people's tooling more powerful

When I was using competitor Propstar it bothered me that I didn't have any control over what it generated.

Automating Figma is a big deal when working on a Figma shadcn/ui library like ours.

I have a theory that other teams can likely use the logic behind Autodocs as an infrastructure layer.

There's great potential to integrate this code — or at least draw inspiration from it — into agentic tooling or tooling that generates Figma specs.

This is why we are releasing the code as open source code with an MIT license (the best license).