Meng To open-sourced ThreeUI, a Three.js React catalog with 4,777 stars

Meng To, founder of Design+Code, has open-sourced ThreeUI, a catalog of interactive Three.js components for React. The repository has 4,777 stars on August 31, from a creation date of August 21. The community edition is MIT-licensed and published on npm as @designcodeio/threeui.

What is in the catalog

The community edition includes 50 parent components across 111 routes, with 141 free variant records and 23 singleton components, for 164 browse results in total. The categories include procedural 3D hero sections, backgrounds, buttons and motion, each with live controls and a variant picker in the browser. The repository README describes it as "the open-source, login-free edition of ThreeUI," using the same application shell and browse experience as the paid site, with Pro and Beta components removed. Every community component keeps all its free variants.

One setup detail is worth knowing before you plan around it. Components that render full HTML documents expect their runtime files at fixed root-relative URLs, so they need asset files copied into the app's public directory. A prop lets you point them elsewhere. That is an extra build step, beyond a simple import.

The commercial context

ThreeUI is Meng To's project, and the community edition is a companion to a paid version. The repository page lists sponsorship tiers ($500, $1,500 and $3,000 a month) for placements in the README and on the docs sidebar. Meng To's own figure for site traffic is "roughly 90,000 views per day as of 26 August 2026," which the page describes as directional context rather than a guarantee of sponsor impressions. Read that number as the site owner's own count; it has not been independently audited.

Pro implementation source is deliberately not included in the community edition, and links to the paid tier lead to the ThreeUI pricing page.

A polished, production-grade Three.js component set has been missing from open source. The usual path to a 3D hero section is a hand-written R3F scene, or a copy from a demo repository with no way to upgrade, or a paid asset. ThreeUI is worth trying on a landing page for that reason alone.

Two things to consider before adding it to a real product. The MIT licence covers the community edition, so ordinary redistribution is fine, and the pricing page marks the tier that adds the rest. And a live 3D component costs GPU work in the browser, so a page carrying several of them will need a review of loading strategy, reduced-motion behaviour and the assets copied into the public directory. The demo is the fair test: run it on a phone before choosing the style.

The interest is real: 4,777 stars in ten days is far more than a hobby project gets. What is less clear is which subset of the components will stay on the free tier if the paid product succeeds. That is worth watching before adopting one as an essential part of a page.

Source

• MengTo/threeui on GitHub, MIT licence for community components. Star count read from the GitHub API on August 31, 2026.