Another simple and free alternative is the Paper Bootstrap theme from Bootswatch:

https://bootswatch.com/paper/

Which is available via CDN: https://www.bootstrapcdn.com/bootswatch/

It's not as polished as the nice library here but it works in a pinch.

On a side note, as for the CDN, MDB is there for you. You can also get it through NPM, Bower and from Github.

It's all here: http://mdbootstrap.com/getting-started/

Even the navbar is a premium component. Pass.

The navbar comes with Bootstrap. I created pages with MDBootstrap that have a navbar and the look is integrated. Maybe you are seeing some of their customized navs?

Out of curiosity, what were the shortcomings of MDL? I personally roll my own CSS/JS per project but I've got a project lined up which requires Material Design and I was considering MDL.

MDL is pretty decent as long as you follow their logic of building material designish principles. I used it only once, but would go back again if it fits the use-case.

I'm glad that you like it! We're keep on improving it as much as possible so any feedback means a world to us.

Feedback: live demo page eats almost all of my core i7 cpu (70% avg, 100% 2/3 of time, Win10/Chrome). I understand the page is very large and loaded with js but that was my first experience with your site, I clicked on Live Demo link and all of a sudden my mouse cursors became unresponsive/slow.

That's something we're currently working on. And by currently I mean that by the end of this week it should be solved. Thank's for noticing.