I Accidentally Open-Sourced My Paid Product (Do Not Make This Mistake)

I built a SaaS starter kit. I published it to GitHub. I listed it on Gumroad for $49. I got 23 cloners in 6 hours. Zero sales. Because the full source code was public. Why would anyone pay $49 for something they can clone for free? The mistake I confused "open source marketing" with "giving away the product." These are different things: Open source marketing: Free content (tutorials, code snippets, example repos) that drives traffic to your paid product. Giving away the product: Putting the actual deliverable in a public repo. ShipFast ($199), Supastarter ($249), MakerKit ($299) — they all use private repos. You pay, you get access. The public presence is marketing: screenshots, feature lists, docs. The fix Made the source code repo private Created a public preview repo — README with features, code snippets, file structure, but NOT the working code Every section ends with a purchase link Gumroad delivers the full zip The checklist (save this) Before launching any paid digital product: