In 2013, Zeno Rocha was setting up a new laptop after his previous one was stolen. He was in the hospital at the time — dealing with a personal health situation — and found that no existing code editor theme worked well under the harsh hospital lighting.

The Theme Born in a Hospital

Zeno created a new dark color scheme from scratch: high contrast, carefully chosen colors, and a name that matched the dark aesthetic. He called it Dracula. He posted it on GitHub as a free, open-source project and largely forgot about it.

Developers found it. Then they contributed to it. Then more found it from those contributions. Without any marketing effort, Dracula spread across code editors: Vim, Emacs, Atom, VS Code, Terminal, iTerm, Sublime Text, and dozens more. By 2020, it had 3 million downloads and ports to 200+ different applications.

Seven Years of Free

Zeno gave Dracula away free for seven years. He never monetized it. The theme became part of his professional identity — mentioned in conference talks, blog posts, and developer Twitter as an example of successful open source. But he had never made a dollar from it.

In early 2020, he decided to change that.

$5,252 in 72 Hours

On February 11, 2020, Zeno launched Dracula PRO — a premium version with additional color variants, a matching wallpaper collection, and exclusive fonts. He priced it at $79 (a one-time purchase). His entire marketing budget was $120.40 for Mailchimp and Typeform.

He posted on Twitter, Reddit, Product Hunt, and Hacker News. Twitter was the top referral source by a wide margin. Within 72 hours, he had made $5,252.47 net of fees.

The $250,000 Business

Dracula PRO went on to generate over $250,000 in total revenue — all from a side project Zeno built while working full-time as a developer at Auth0 (later Resend, which he co-founded). The theme became the foundation of a broader developer tools brand.