Why we ship every icon and kit under CC0

Why we ship every icon and kit under CC0

AEFRI engineering note · 2026-11-03

This article was written with AI assistance (an AI coding agent) and reviewed against the project's own test suite. Disclosed per DEV's guidelines; see the #ABotWroteThis tag.

The licensing question nobody asks until launch day

When you sell a digital asset, the license is the product. A buyer who cannot tell whether they may use your icons in a commercial app, whether they must credit you, or whether the license survives a resale of their own product, will not buy - or will buy once and never come back. We decided early that every asset we ship would be CC0 (public domain dedication) unless there was a specific reason not to, and that the reason would be stated on the product page.

What CC0 actually buys us

agreement, track attribution, or ask permission. The asset is theirs.

SaaS?" emails, because the answer is always yes.

a marketing adjective. It is the one line in our listings that we never have to soften.

What it costs us

earn more per buyer over time. We gave that up deliberately.

value is in the curation, the consistency, and the packaging, not in withholding the bits.

included, there is no higher tier to sell. The revenue model is volume and bundles, not license ladders.

How we keep the promise checkable

Each product page states the license in plain language and links to the full text. The asset files themselves carry the license in a LICENSE.txt inside the zip, so a buyer who forwards the files still has the terms. The Everything Bundle lists every component license explicitly rather than hiding behind a single umbrella claim.

The catalog

All of these are CC0 or permissive, and all are available now:

Full catalogue and previews: https://aefristore.web.app

Where it lives

Catalogue and previews: https://aefristore.web.app Ko-fi shop: https://ko-fi.com/aefrinet itch.io: https://aefri.itch.io/interface-essentials-svg-icons

If you are building a similar storefront, decide the license before you decide the price. The license is the harder decision, and it is the one buyers actually check.