Hyvä offers a free license — and we wanted to see exactly how far you can take it. So we built chillyourbeans.co.uk, a coffee e-commerce site, entirely on the Hyvä free tier. The short answer: you can build a production-ready store.
What the Free License Includes
The Hyvä free license gives you the core theme — Tailwind CSS, Alpine.js, the component library, layout XML compatibility, and the build tooling. You get everything you need to build a complete storefront. The paid licence adds Hyvä Checkout, additional modules, and priority support, but the free tier is not a demo — it's a real theme.
The Build
Chill Your Beans is a single-origin coffee shop. The catalogue is straightforward — coffee beans by origin, roast level, and grind type. But the frontend needed to feel premium. We built custom product cards with roast profile visualisations, a filterable catalogue using Alpine.js, and a responsive mega menu.
Every component was built from scratch in Hyvä's template system. No Luma fallbacks, no legacy JavaScript. The styling is pure Tailwind CSS, which means the entire stylesheet compiles down to only the classes we actually use.
Tailwind CSS in Magento
Working with Tailwind in Magento via Hyvä is a fundamentally different experience to the traditional Less-based theming. You're not overriding variables in a cascade of Less files and hoping nothing breaks downstream. You're writing utility classes directly in your templates with full control over every element.
For Chill Your Beans, we used Tailwind 4 with the new CSS-first configuration. The build is fast, the output is small, and the developer experience is leagues ahead of the old approach.
Alpine.js for Interactivity
Alpine.js handles everything interactive — product image galleries, add-to-cart behaviour, filter toggles, mobile navigation, and the mini-cart drawer. It feels like writing vanilla JavaScript with a thin reactive layer on top. No build step complexity, no virtual DOM overhead.
The total JavaScript shipped to the browser for the entire site is under 80KB. Compare that to a default Luma theme which ships several hundred kilobytes before a single custom line of code.
Results
Lighthouse performance scores sit in the mid-90s. The site loads fast, feels responsive, and works well on mobile. We proved that the free licence is more than capable of powering a real store.
If you're evaluating Hyvä and want to see what's possible before committing to the paid tier, chillyourbeans.co.uk is proof that the free licence is a genuine starting point — not a limited trial.