Font AwesomeA few months ago, we started to notice something uncomfortable in the Web Awesome- Awesomeverse. Not outright anger from the community, but maybe something more like skepticism.
This uncomfortable feeling showed up in Discord threads and support emails. We were getting the message that folks were testing the waters, but that maybe they weren’t sure they trusted us just yet. And when we took an honest look at what was happening, the answer started coming into view: during the Web Awesome Kickstarter, we were in a rush to ship, and we’d started acting more like a product company instead of an open source project. We were sending mixed signals.
That’s not who we are.
How It Happened
During a Kickstarter, shipping on time matters. Backers were waiting, but there’s a cost to working fast, and in this situation the cost was that we’d lost clarity about what Web Awesome actually is, and about who it’s for.
We had prioritized account creation, which made the paywall feel more prominent than the free tier, but that wasn’t the result of sneaky intentions. Our real-time decisions were the result of a team figuring out how to be a sustainable business while also staying true to an open source project. Those two things are genuinely tricky to balance, and we found the line by crossing it.
What’s Actually True
As an open source web components library, Web Awesome is likely the most serious platform-agnostic option in the web components space right now. We’re not trying to puff ourselves up by making that claim, it’s just the reality of the landscape.
Our goal has always been to lower the bar for building accessible, usable, well-made things on the web. A lot of the built-in challenges like accessibility, component behavior, cross-framework compatibility, are difficulties that individual developers and small teams shouldn’t have to solve from the ground up every single time. Web Awesome exists to solve those issues once, for everybody.
So, why does this mean? Well, the free tier isn’t a funnel. The free tier is the whole point.
Web Awesome Pro exists because building and maintaining a serious open source project requires a team to maintain it, and teams need to eat. To put it in perspective, the conversion rate on a project like this is probably somewhere in the neighborhood of between 1–4%. That means the majority of people who use Web Awesome will never pay for it. And that’s totally cool, because that’s a model we believe in and always have. The goal is to give useful tools to as many people as possible while also providing options to those who want to take things up a notch.
The Course Correction
We’ve already changed the homepage to lower the bar to entry. And we have a public CDN that’s available to everyone. Now, signing up for Web Awesome is optional, but not required, and we’ve got more coming. We’re not building more features as a Public Relations gimmick, but as a reflection of what was always true, but got obscured for a minute.
We didn’t need to convince ourselves to care about open source. We needed to be reminded again not to let the pressure to ship fast pull us away from it. And when Cory raised the concern internally, the response from leadership was immediate: yeah, go fix it.
Being able to raise those kinds of concerns, and pump the brakes, is not a given at most companies. And that feels worth highlighting, too.
What Comes Next
Trust isn’t rebuilt through announcements, but by showing up consistently over time, shipping good work, to ensure the free tier is genuinely useful, and then being honest when something goes sideways.
That’s our plan. Not because it’s good marketing, but because it has been, and always will be, the only version of this worth doing.
