Vercel’s Spring 2025 Open Source Cohort
Vercel’s Open Source Program supports maintainers with resources to help their projects scale. The initiative runs quarterly, and each accepted project receives $3,600 in Vercel credits, partner perks, and access to a dedicated Slack workspace. The spring 2025 cohort spans a broad range of tools, from UI libraries and frameworks to AI chat apps and even a Spanish-syntax programming language.
Design and UI tooling
Several projects in this cohort focus on the shadcn/ui ecosystem and developer experience around it. tweakcn builds on shadcn/ui to let users generate themes with AI and drop them into v0 or other shadcn/ui apps; it passed 500 GitHub stars within two weeks of launch and now sits near 2.5K. shadcn-form combines the copy/paste approach of shadcn/ui with react-hook-form and zod for faster form development, and has 2.2K stars. shadcn-table provides a quick setup for tables with server-side pagination, sorting, and filtering, reaching nearly 5K stars. KokonutUI is a component collection installable via the shadcn/ui CLI, and can be opened in v0 for further customization.
Also in the UI space, RetroUI is an open source library based on React, Next.js, and shadcn/ui whose components can also be opened in v0. Lenis is a lightweight smooth-scroll library with 33K weekly npm downloads and 10K GitHub stars, designed for easy integration and modern browser optimization—useful for parallax and WebGL syncing effects. Milkdown lets developers build rich-text markdown editors, offering the Crepe editor as a ready-to-use package with pre-designed themes. It has nearly 10K stars and over 17K weekly npm downloads.
AI and data tooling
A number of projects address AI workflows. Morphic is an AI-powered search engine with generative UI that needs just two API keys for Vercel deployment; it has grown to 7.3K stars and 2K forks. Zola is being built as an open source, multi-model AI chat app focused on speed and accessibility. LobeChat is a larger-scale project with over 60K GitHub stars and 12K forks—a modern AI chat framework supporting multiple AI providers, knowledge management, multimodal plugins, and one-click private deployment.
Beyond AI, Valibot provides schema-based data validation. It began as a research paper and now has 7.5K GitHub stars and nearly 1 million weekly npm downloads. jsPDF, the first PDF generation library in JavaScript, sees nearly 2 million weekly npm downloads and counts NASA among its users. Vecto3d converts SVGs into 3D models without charging for export; since launch it has received over 40K site visits and over 1,000 GitHub stars.
Developer workflow and platforms
Several projects aim to simplify developer workflows. Script Kit is a desktop app for launching scripts, with an SDK for desktop/API actions and custom prompts to handle user input/output. It has over 8K commits across repos and an established community. Fumadocs is a documentation framework for Next.js with more than 6K GitHub stars; Vercel uses it internally for the Flags SDK and Turborepo docs. nuqs is a type-safe search params state manager for React frameworks with over 300K weekly npm downloads, popular in the Next.js community. Nemo helps Next.js developers understand how to build with middleware and compose smaller middlewares, at nearly 5K weekly downloads.
For site builders and communities, CourseLit is a platform for building and selling digital products on your own site, with all infrastructure open sourced for self-hosting. Comp AI is an open source compliance automation platform positioned as an alternative to Vanta and Drata; it logged over 1,000 commits in the past 90 days and has an active Discord of 500 developers. Frontpage is a federated link aggregator adopted as the defacto link-aggregation site for the Bluesky community, letting users post, vote, and comment on web links. Gridiron Survivor is a community of open source builders creating projects publicly to build resumes and land jobs; Elfgorithm is one such project being built in the open.
Finally, EsJS takes a different approach to accessibility: it’s a programming language with Spanish syntax that compiles to JavaScript, letting Spanish speakers learn programming in a familiar way without giving up the power of the underlying language.
The full cohort represents what the program is aimed at: community-maintained projects that benefit from a little extra infrastructure support. Applications for the next cohort open in January.
