Earlier this month I shipped two premium templates — a SaaS landing page and a developer portfolio. Not a startup, not a SaaS, just templates. This post is about the two constraints I built them under, why they made the code better, and a few things I learned launching as a solo dev with zero audience.
Constraint 1: zero dependencies beyond next, react, and tailwind
Open the package.json of most templates and you'll find 20+ packages: icon libraries, animation libraries, carousel plugins, UI kits, utility libraries. Every one of them is a version conflict waiting to happen for the buyer, and most are replaceable with a few lines of code in 2026.
What I used instead:
Icons → inline SVG components. An icon component is ~10 lines. You need maybe 15 icons for a landing page.
