I am making Frontend Hire closed source again.
This is not a dramatic pivot. It is just me being honest about what I want from this project now.
I want to monetize the time and effort I put into Frontend Hire.
Creating genuinely useful content takes a lot of work. And now, with AI, I can iterate on good content much faster than before. That only makes me want to take the product more seriously and build a better business around it instead of keeping everything open by default.
Why I am doing this
When a project is open source, I naturally slow down. I start thinking more about polish, code quality, edge cases, public scrutiny, and whether every implementation is clean enough for everyone else to read.
That mindset is useful, but it is not the mindset I want right now.
I want to move faster, ship faster, and spend more time improving the actual learning experience.
Closed source gives me more room to do that.
Why this matters to me personally
Another big reason is that I have been growing a lot as a Product Engineer, and that is a track I want to get much better at.
I want to keep building products with stronger taste, better judgment, and more speed. And I also want Frontend Hire to reflect that growth in the way I teach.
Teaching has always been one of the best ways for me to sharpen what I know. So a big part of this next phase is simple: get better at product engineering by doing it, and get better at teaching it by sharing that work well.
What stays free and what changes
All the current content will remain free.
All new content will be paywalled.
Open Houses will still remain free.
Once payments are integrated properly, the Discord server will also become part of the paid offering and turn into a paywalled community.
Quick technical note
The recent refactor also made this a good time to do it. Frontend Hire now runs on Next.js, I use Bun for local workflows, Ultracite with Biome for code quality checks, and Vercel for deployment.
The stack is simpler now, and that helps me focus more on content and product velocity.
That is really the whole point of this change.
Thanks
- YHR