A milestone five years in the making
Dear customers, partners, colleagues and friends,
As Hyvä is celebrating its 5th year of existence, I’m extremely grateful for where it is today.
The following is a personal look back at 5 years of Hyvä, a (rather long) take on our long-term strategy and the long-planned next step for Hyvä - making the Hyvä Theme open source and freely available - and a rare insight into our decision-making process and strategic planning from day one.
The inception of Hyvä
As you all well know, Hyvä was born out of necessity, 5 years ago. It started with a lack of frontend options and an industry-wide switch to headless/composable frontends that were forced upon the Magento community. A direction the majority of the community did not feel comfortable with, leaving merchants, agencies, and extension vendors lost between the deprecated Luma frontend and a range of immature Single Page Applications.
Many of us did not agree with this evolution of frontends. After refactoring the traditional frontend into a solution I’d enjoy working with myself, Hyvä Theme was built within a couple of months. All of a sudden, development was fun again, results came quickly, and the theme evolved at an incredible rate.
Vision and Mission
With my industry hero Vinai Kopp joining very early on, we then faced a crucial decision together. Where does this frontend fit into the Magento ecosystem? Most open-source solutions that are freely available receive little backing. Gaining traction, support and getting code contributions (let alone financial support) is incredibly difficult in today's tech world.
It soon became clear to us that in order to succeed, this had to become much more than a theme. It needed the outlook of a long-term supported product with a healthy ecosystem, and the backing of a renowned company and partner network, which was created from the very beginning.
Partnership-based business model
With paid licenses, we would cover continued development, the promise of long-term support, and laser-sharp focus on building out the product, ecosystem and partner network.
A partner program that rewarded code contributions, mostly to compatibility modules, very quickly created a wide range of supported third-party modules, which triggered the entire extension ecosystem to eventually jump on board and offer first-party support. It was a no-brainer as our customers were actively using their products already, and support was offered by our quickly growing Community.
There was a business case that we clearly laid out, and it has proven to provide sustainability and steady income for our extension partners.
We continuously invested resources in growing our extension ecosystem together with our partners, as we knew a mere Theme wouldn’t cut it, compatibility and extensibility are the defining factors to our growth and sustainability.
“Magento is now Adobe Commerce”
Our ambitions were bigger, though. The unrest in the Magento Community around the rebranding of Magento to Adobe Commerce and the shift from productising Magento towards the repositioning of Magento being a mere codebase had increasingly created doubt about the future of Magento agencies and extension providers. We realised we needed to add long-term support for Magento to our agenda.
We have always been fully committed to Magento, and our company depends on it. By choice, and design.
That’s why in 2021, we initiated the “open letter to the Magento community” as a wakeup call to Adobe and the Magento Association, to voice our concerns and announce our plans to take matters into our own hands.
Over 1,500 industry leaders endorsed and co-signed the letter, and things started moving quite quickly with the founding of the Mage-OS foundation. We spent the past 4 years building that entity further out, supporting the wider Magento ecosystem beyond the interests of Hyvä.
The open letter and the existence of Mage-OS had the results we hoped for. People got behind the initiative and started contributing and driving innovation forward on the Magento platform via the Mage-OS fork. But it also sparked a new interest from Adobe in the future of the Open-Source codebase they acquired. Via direct, open dialogue with their leadership teams, we established a common understanding of the importance of the Magento ecosystem and the needs of our community.
The Magento Association played an intermediary role in this, and I joined their board with the sole purpose of achieving this alignment between Adobe and the Community. The ambitious plans to create an LTS (Long Term Support) and STS (Short Term Support) version of Magento, owned by the Magento Association, never materialised, but we did settle on the Community Led Prioritization Process as a direct result of these conversations.
With the new guarantees from Adobe around long-term support for Magento Open Source, we then felt secure about the health and security of the Magento framework. However, that still left Magento without a product vision as it was no longer considered a product by Adobe, no longer receiving marketing exposure and no longer receiving new product features.
This is where we knew we could play a pivotal role in the future of the platform. Without marketing, without a roadmap and without a vision, Magento would be reduced to only that: a codebase
These past 5 years have been defined by two ambitions: to grow Hyvä into a company that could carry the Magento legacy on, and to give back to the community.
Growing Hyvä
Our company grew from 4 people in 2021 to 10 people by 2022. By that time, we had already expanded our offering with Hyvä Checkout and Hyvä UI, and we were building Hyvä Enterprise to add Adobe Commerce compatibility.
All of this development and building up of our go-to-market capabilities was funded by the sales of our Theme.
We have so far succeeded with our first ambition to grow Hyvä as a company, with 6,000+ live customers and more and more recurring revenue from our secondary products. Hyvä has become the de facto standard Magento frontend in many people’s minds (even Reddit agrees), and we continue to grow steadily.
Hyvä has firmly established its position in the eCommerce midmarket segment and surpassed many other frontends and platforms in the top 1 million eCommerce websites worldwide, and we power some of the largest merchants worldwide, including Nestlé, Volkswagen, Dunkin’, Jysk and Replay Jean.
In 2025, we introduced a top-tier certification program to form a solid learning foundation and ensure partners implement best practices for performance and maintainability.
We made our financial foundation even stronger by engaging in premium partnerships in 2024 with Mollie and 2025 with Hypernode/Maxcluster, without giving up any autonomy.
Hyvä today remains 100% bootstrapped and independent.
Giving back to the Magento Community
Building out our company, investing in more products and steadily growing our revenues enabled us to give back more and more to the Magento Community. Most of our team contributes on a weekly basis to the Magento Association, Mage-OS, and local chapters like Mage-OS Netherlands.
We also accelerated the return of Magento events, which nearly disappeared entirely during COVID, by sponsoring, attending and even co-organising as many editions as we possibly could.
Over the course of the past 5 years, we have supported Meet Magento Netherlands, UK, NYC, Florida, India, Baltics, Spain, Italy, Brazil, Romania, France, Ukraine, Canada, Philippines, Poland, Malaysia. Plus several MageTitans and UnConferences and local meet-ups across the UK, Germany and Italy, where we now have a local presence.
Meanwhile, we’ve been bulking up all these years to finally realise our ultimate goal, which leads us to our second ambition: the ultimate way to give back.
Hyvä Theme goes Open Source
This November, 2025, we are relicensing the Hyvä Theme to OSL3 + AFL3. This means that, like Magento Open Source, our Theme can be used free of charge and redistributed under commercial licenses.
All modules that support our Theme will be relicensed alongside it, under the OSL3 license. The rest of our product offering (Checkout, Enterprise and Commerce) will remain proprietary under our commercial license.
That means that anyone can have access to the code of our Theme and thus learn, build and profit from it. This will enable the Magento ecosystem to build even more extensions on top of Hyvä and lower the barrier to entry for smaller businesses. We truly hope this also opens doors for students and beginning entrepreneurs to start their journey with Magento, the way many of us did over a decade ago.
This also means that anyone will be able to build a commercial theme on top of Hyvä and sell it under their preferred license terms (thanks to the dual AFL licensing). This will also lower the barrier to entry, with premade templates being available on the market.
A new impulse to the Open Source ecosystem, renewed collaboration and contributions, and a new impulse to beginning merchants will help us grow the Magento user base and allow merchants to grow into midmarket and even up to the enterprise level.
They who own the lower end of the market will own the middle market.
With Hyvä + Magento, merchants have the ultimate flexibility to build what they need, own what they build, own their customer data, and make use of a fair and open market to choose the service providers that best suit their needs. Not those that your SaaS would dictate.
-> Starting November 10, 2025, the Hyvä Theme will be freely available on GitHub and via free Packagist Composer keys provided through our Hyvä Portal at hyva.io.
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Hyvä UI will become available as a separate product, at just 250€ per Magento store.
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Existing Hyvä Theme licensees will keep their premium support and access to Hyvä UI.
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Cashbacks will always be available for those who upgrade to Hyvä Commerce.
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Hyvä Checkout and Hyvä Enterprise will no longer require a paid Hyvä Theme license
Thank you for believing in better
We are immensely proud of what we’ve built with your support over the past 5 years, and we’re super excited to continue our journey with you.
