The most common question I get from Nuxas buyers is: "what do I actually change?" The answer is reassuring — less than you think.
Here are the patterns I have seen across founders who shipped on Nuxas in the last year.
What founders keep
The architecture. Nobody rewrites the Nitro API structure. It is clean, it works, and rewriting it costs weeks for no gain.
The theming system. The CSS token architecture and zero-flash dark mode are the most-praised feature. Founders swap the brand color and move on.
The SEO pipeline. @nuxtjs/seo, per-page meta, sitemap generation — all inherited. This is the single biggest time saver, because SEO is the easiest thing to defer and the most expensive thing to retrofit.
What founders change
The landing page. Every founder rewrites the hero. This is expected — the hero is your product's voice, and a template cannot write it for you.
The pricing page. Product-market fit lives in pricing. Founders experiment with tiers, anchors, and CTAs. The template provides the structure; the strategy is theirs.
The auth provider. Some prefer Supabase, some Firebase, some Lucia. The template ships with a clean auth abstraction so swapping providers is a config change, not a rewrite.
What founders wish they had known
Start with the CMS edition if you have clients. The most common upgrade path is Code Only to Code plus Decap CMS, usually after a client asks to edit their own blog. Buying the CMS edition upfront saves the migration.
Do not touch the SEO defaults until launch. Founders often "improve" the SEO config before shipping, then forget to revert. Ship with defaults, measure, then optimize.
Use the docs. Every module in Nuxas has a README. The founders who ship fastest are the ones who read them before modifying.
The result
Founders on Nuxas ship their first version in 3 to 7 days, not 6 weeks. That is the entire point: the template removes the infrastructure tax so the founder can focus on the product.
If you are choosing between editions:
- Code Only if you are a solo developer comfortable editing Markdown.
- Code + Decap CMS if you are an agency, freelancer, or have non-technical collaborators.
- Custom Web App if your product needs bespoke business logic beyond a template.