BlockDex

BlockDex checks if public shadcn components are free before install

I could not tell which shadcn registry held the component I needed, so I crawled all 978 of them

When I need something like a date picker or a marquee, the component usually already exists in a registry I have never heard of, and finding it costs me more than building it badly would. Searching inside a registry is not the hard part. shadcn search does that for the registries you have already pointed it at. Knowing which one to point it at is.

So I built BlockDex. It crawls every public shadcn registry it can find once a night and reads the manifest itself, so the unit is the item rather than the library. It holds 76,685 components, blocks, hooks, themes and utilities, each with its install command and its dependencies, and a removal date when a component stops existing. The official directory lists 292 registries. This crawl finds 978.

The part I use most is the free or paid verdict, because it is measured rather than read off a pricing page. The crawler fetches the item endpoint, the exact URL the install command fetches. If the source comes back, the item is free. A 401 is how a paid registry announces itself. 31,328 items came back free, 10,943 came back paid, and 34,414 are unverified because those registries serve no item endpoint to ask. An item nothing answered for stays unknown, and unknown is never counted as free.

Nothing on the site was submitted, sponsored or placed by hand, and there is no way to buy a position. There is an open API, and the method page shows the working.

https://blockdex.kynth.studio

The correction I want: name a public registry that serves a manifest and is not in the 978. Registries were found four ways, from seeds, GitHub code search, the registry topics and the ecosystem's awesome-list, so one that is only discoverable some fifth way is exactly what I am missing.