Lynton has released its entire portfolio of eight HubSpot CMS themes as free, open-source code under the MIT license. Previously available on the HubSpot Marketplace for free with premium options at $299, the themes have been installed in over 20,000 portals. They are now fully accessible on GitHub with no restrictions.
The release marks a final step in the company’s departure from the HubSpot partner ecosystem. Lynton left the partnership to focus on building open, standards-based web frameworks. Architecture you actually own, rather than a closed ecosystem you rent.
From here, the story is ours.
Building themes since the launch of the CMS
We started building HubSpot themes when HubSpot launched its from-the-ground-up rebuild of the CMS. The original CMS ran on DotNetNuke, a platform we had already mastered. HubSpot’s fork of DotNetNuke failed to give users meaningful control over template and module HTML. When HubSpot replaced it with a native CMS built around HubL, its proprietary markup language (similar to Shopify’s Liquid), we didn’t hesitate to fully embrace the new technology.
Demand was clear. At HubSpot’s launch, our free email templates were downloaded thousands of times. Website themes were the natural next step.
Our themes became the foundation for every custom website we built. When a customer downloaded Spark Premium or Brightlane Plus, they got the exact same rock-solid base we used for our custom builds.
Open Source as the Logical Conclusion
The marketplace was never a revenue driver. We actually lost money on themes. We invested more in design, development, maintenance, and support than we ever recouped in sales. Thousands of man hours went into supporting this labor of love.
When we left the HubSpot partnership, we had to decide what to do with our marketplace listings. The answer was straightforward: leaving the partnership meant ending our active support for the themes. Leaving unsupported themes on the marketplace would have been irresponsible, so we pulled them down.
It wouldn’t have been right to let the themes die a sudden death and leave users with read-only code. The only path forward was to gift the themes to the community. We released the complete source code under the MIT license without restrictions. Fork it, sell it, give it away, or gut it and rebuild it. The code is yours.
And here is the uncomfortable truth about the HubSpot marketplace: you may get more value from this unsupported, open-source code than you ever could from a supported marketplace install.
The marketplace distribution model imposes limitations that demand scrutiny from sellers and customers alike:
Read-only installation
Installing a theme from the marketplace locks the code. Every template, module, and stylesheet is read-only. Implementing child themes manually cloning individual assets and is gated by subscription tier. You only get as many child themes as your HubSpot tier allows. This limitation is severely limiting to the customer’s ability to customize, grow, or evolve their site.
Distribution limitations
Marketplace requirements prohibit themes from including serverless functions. Modules have their own distribution constraints that limit integration capabilities. HubSpot limits what a developer can ship.
Unsustainable economics
We are not the only developer pouring unbillable hours into supporting marketplace themes. The model demands enterprise-grade maintenance and support, but the return on investment rarely justifies the cost. Developers and agencies absorb the support burden while the vendor owns the distribution channel.
Vendor-controlled distribution
You build on HubSpot’s platform, in their language, distributed through their channel, under their rules. HubSpot holds all the keys.
Dismantling the Code Lock
We wrote about The Five Locks, the mechanisms SaaS vendors use to keep companies trapped. The Code Lock is about proprietary languages that only work inside one platform. HubL is a textbook example. Every template, module, and dynamic element written in HubL has zero portability outside HubSpot.
We built HubL-based themes, modules and websites for over a decade. Every theme we shipped deepened the Code Lock for thousands of portals. We spent years building tools that made leaving HubSpot harder.
Open-sourcing the code doesn’t undo that. The themes are still HubL. They only run inside HubSpot. Releasing the source code addresses a second layer of lock-in most people ignore: the marketplace distribution lock.
Installing a theme from the marketplace locks you twice. You are locked into HubL, the platform’s proprietary language. You are locked out of the code itself, forced into read-only files and child theme workarounds. Open-sourcing eliminates the second lock entirely. Clone the repo. Open it in VS Code. Edit every file. Track changes in Git. Deploy through CI/CD. The code is yours to modify or tear apart.
HubSpot developers write code every day inside a prison with bars they can’t always see. The proprietary language, the marketplace restrictions, the subscription-gated workarounds.
A developer with full source code access can use AI tools to analyze, refactor, and learn from the codebase. They can extract the logic and figure out what this code looks like outside of HubSpot. Source code access turns a locked marketplace install into a migration bridge.
HubSpot developers write code every day inside a prison with bars they can’t always see. The proprietary language, the marketplace restrictions, the subscription-gated workarounds. They feel the constraints without naming them. As those walls close in, the path out leads to open source. We’re opening a door. Where developers go from here is up to them.
Existing Installs
If you already installed a Lynton theme from the marketplace, it still works. Nothing changes on your end. We just won’t push updates through the marketplace because the listings are gone. We also won’t maintain the open-source repos.
The code is available for the community to take forward. If someone wants to actively contribute, we will promote them to a GitHub contributor so the themes can live on. Otherwise, developers can fork, download, and take complete control of the code. That was never possible through the marketplace.
A Note to the HubSpot Partner Community
This is for the agencies still deep in the ecosystem, earning commissions, building exclusively within the platform, and seeing their value entirely as HubSpot expertise.
If you define your agency by its HubSpot status and expertise, consider what it would look like if you stopped building only in HubSpot. If you stopped selling customers software they don’t need just to stay in the good graces of a partner program. The commissions come at a price. That price is higher than you realize.
Challenge yourself: a client using HubSpot CRM doesn’t automatically need HubSpot CMS for their website. How important are features like drag-and-drop visual editing, and are they worth more than page speed and extensibility? Are you supporting the client in achieving their goals? Are you choosing the right tool for the job, or the tool that keeps you in a partnership tier?
We spent 16 years inside that ecosystem. The partnership creates a gravitational pull that makes looking beyond the platform difficult. You see your value as HubSpot expertise instead of business expertise. You stop thinking about how HubSpot’s technology fits into the broader landscape.
Here is what we learned the hard way. The right tool is often outside of HubSpot. When it is, implementation is usually faster and cheaper. You earn more trust with the customer. You deliver a better result. Compare that to earning commissions while fighting platform limitations, managing workarounds, and absorbing delivery overruns.
Being a trusted advisor means recommending the best solution, not the solution that pays a referral fee. Commissions look good on a spreadsheet until you account for margin erosion, scope creep, and the reputation risk of tying your name to software that can’t support what you sold.
Choose the right tool for the job, every time. Even when it means walking away from easy money.
Building What’s Next
We left HubSpot to build AI-native websites on open-source infrastructure. Sites that load in under a second. Content that lives in systems you own. AI that works natively instead of through a vendor’s sandboxed add-on. Infrastructure costs that drop 80 to 90 percent compared to the same capabilities on HubSpot or comparable SaaS platforms.
The themes represent where we’ve been. They are a gift to the community that we called home for 16 years. The code is free, the source is open. Do what you want with it.
If you are still building on HubSpot CMS, the themes are yours. If you are ready to build beyond it, let’s talk.
All 8 themes are available at lyntonweb.com/hubspot-cms-themes and on GitHub. MIT license. No strings.