Four starters compared on price, stack, features, and what you’ll still have to build yourself before you can charge customers.
Methodology. Pricing was verified against each vendor’s public pricing page as of May 2026. Feature inventories are taken from each kit’s documented contents. We have not personally built production apps using every kit listed; this is a research synthesis of public docs, pricing, and user reports. How we research.
Auth, billing, transactional email, organisation management, role-based access, an admin surface, and a marketing page that doesn’t look like a default Tailwind template — that is roughly four to eight weeks of work before a paying customer can swipe a card. A boilerplate compresses that block of plumbing to a weekend so the founder spends week two on whatever the product actually does.
The trade is fit. Boilerplates are opinionated. You inherit their stack choices, their folder layout, their billing abstraction. If those choices match what you would have built anyway, you save weeks. If they don’t, you spend the saved time fighting the abstraction. The boilerplate-fit question is more important than the price question, which is why most of this page is spent on what is actually in the box rather than which one is cheapest.
A second axis matters in 2026 that did not matter in 2022: how legible the codebase is to AI coding tools. A starter that ships AGENTS.md, Cursor rules, and an MCP server gives Claude Code and Cursor structured context, which produces meaningfully cleaner edits than dropping a tool into an unannotated codebase. The broader 2026 boilerplate roundup covers this shift in more depth.
Every boilerplate on this page is evaluated against the same six questions:
Pricing reflects the listed price on each vendor’s pricing page in May 2026. Stacks are summarised; full breakdowns sit in each verdict block below.
| Boilerplate | Price | License | Stack | Updates | Recommended for |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ShipFast | $199 one-time (Starter) | Unlimited personal projects | Next.js + MongoDB or Supabase | Lifetime updates | Solo founders shipping their first MVP fast |
| Makerkit | $299 one-time (Pro) | Unlimited personal projects | Next.js 16 + Supabase or Drizzle/Prisma + Better Auth | Lifetime updates | Supabase-native solo founders using Claude Code or Cursor |
| Supastarter | $349 one-time (Solo) | 1 dev seat, unlimited personal projects | Next.js + Hono + Prisma/Drizzle + Better Auth | Lifetime updates | B2B SaaS needing multi-tenant orgs out of the box |
| Lovable | $25/mo (Pro) | Per workspace, credit-based | React/TanStack Start + Tailwind + Supabase | Continuous (managed) | Non-coders validating an idea before hiring a dev |
ShipFast is Marc Lou’s starter and the most-discussed SaaS boilerplate in indie hacker circles. Its dominance is half product and half distribution: a $199 entry price, an opinionated stack you can deploy in an afternoon, and a very public founder who ships SaaS himself. For more depth on the kit’s strengths and gaps, see the full ShipFast review.
Next.js App Router (with /pages router still supported), JavaScript or TypeScript, MongoDB or Supabase for the database, NextAuth with Google OAuth and magic links, Stripe or Lemon Squeezy for payments, Mailgun or Resend for transactional email, Tailwind CSS with DaisyUI for the component layer.
Solo founders who want a deployed product by the end of a weekend and value an obvious, well-trodden path over architectural elegance.
Roughly $30–$50 per month. Vercel Hobby covers most early-stage traffic; a paid plan kicks in around the time the product needs custom domains or analytics. MongoDB Atlas shared cluster runs about $9 a month, Resend’s entry tier covers up to 3,000 emails a month free, and a custom domain is the only other fixed cost. Stripe fees are usage-based and excluded from this number.
git clone <your-private-shipfast-repo> cd shipfast && npm install cp .env.example .env.local npm run dev
Buy ShipFast if you are a solo founder shipping your first or second SaaS, you want the cheapest credible kit with the largest community, and you don’t need multi-tenancy or organisation management.
Get ShipFast — $199 one-time, unlimited projects →Affiliate link — we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. How we disclose.
Makerkit is Giancarlo Buomprisco’s kit and reads as the most carefully engineered option in this group. It is also the one most explicitly built for the 2026 workflow: AI coding tools as the primary author, with structured rule files telling Claude Code and Cursor what to do. The full Makerkit review goes deeper on architecture.
Next.js 16, React 19, TypeScript 5, Supabase (auth, Postgres, RLS, storage) or Drizzle/Prisma with Better Auth if you prefer to bring your own database, Stripe for billing with a pre-built customer portal, React.Email with Resend or SMTP, shadcn/ui components on Tailwind CSS v4.
The solo founder who already knows Supabase, plans to use Claude Code or Cursor heavily, and is building something they expect to maintain for years.
Roughly $45–$70 per month. Vercel Pro at $20 covers the production deploy, Supabase Pro at $25 covers the database and auth at this scale, Resend or a comparable email provider sits at $20 once you cross the free tier’s monthly limit, and the domain is the rounding error. Stripe fees again excluded.
npx create-makerkit-app@latest my-saas cd my-saas && pnpm install pnpm supabase start && pnpm dev
Buy Makerkit if you’re comfortable with Supabase, want the cleanest AI-coding workflow available in a paid kit today, and are building a product you intend to maintain for two-plus years rather than a weekend experiment.
Explore Makerkit — $299 one-time (Pro) →The name is misleading: Supastarter is not Supabase-only. The 2026 version of the kit lets you pick your database (Postgres via Drizzle or Prisma) and your auth (Better Auth, with first-class support for passkeys, 2FA, and OAuth). Its angle is B2B SaaS: organisations, seats, invites, RBAC, and billing that handles per-seat pricing are all present on day one.
Next.js App Router, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, Better Auth with passwords/passkeys/magic links/OAuth/2FA, Hono.js for the API layer, Prisma or Drizzle ORM with a database of your choosing, Stripe plus optional Lemon Squeezy, Polar, Creem, and Dodo for billing, multiple email provider integrations, S3-compatible file storage, and TanStack Query on the client.
Founders building B2B SaaS that needs organisation-scoped accounts, team invites, and per-seat billing from launch, or agencies who want a reusable starting point across client projects.
Roughly $50–$80 per month, very similar to Makerkit: Vercel Pro at $20, a managed Postgres tier in the $20–$30 range (Neon, Railway, or Supabase’s database-only plan), Resend or equivalent at $20 once over the free tier, and the domain. S3-compatible storage from Cloudflare R2 or Backblaze adds a couple of dollars at this scale.
git clone <your-supastarter-repo> cd supastarter && pnpm install pnpm db:push && pnpm dev
Buy Supastarter if you’re building B2B SaaS where teams, invites, and per-seat billing are core requirements, or you’re an agency wanting one well-architected starter to reuse across client work.
Explore Supastarter — $349 one-time (Solo) →Lovable is not a boilerplate. It is an AI app builder that generates a full project from a prompt and hosts it for you, with the generated code available for export. It sits on this list because for a non-coding founder, it is a real alternative to buying a starter kit; the same outcome — auth, database, payments, deployed — with no git clone step.
For apps created before May 13 2026: React with Vite, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, shadcn/ui, Radix UI, Supabase for auth and Postgres. For new apps on non-Enterprise plans since May 13 2026: TanStack Start with server-side rendering. Stripe integration is offered via prompt or template; the generated code is exportable.
Founders who are not Next.js developers and want to validate a SaaS idea end-to-end before hiring engineering help or learning the stack themselves.
$25 per month for the Pro plan plus whatever Supabase and Stripe cost downstream. If you stay inside Lovable’s managed hosting and Supabase’s free tier, the all-in fixed cost can stay under $30 a month at low traffic. Once you outgrow Supabase free, add $25 for Supabase Pro.
Open lovable.dev → describe your app → iterate via prompt
Use Lovable if you cannot write a Next.js app yourself and want a paying-customer-ready prototype before you commit to a code-based stack; migrate to ShipFast or Makerkit once your idea is validated and you need full control of the code.
Try Lovable — $25/mo Pro →You’ve never shipped a Next.js app before. Start with the Next.js docs and build something tiny end-to-end first. A boilerplate dropped on a developer who hasn’t yet internalised App Router, Server Components, and Server Actions becomes a black box you can’t debug. Spend a weekend on the official tutorial, then come back and the $199 starts paying for itself in week one. If you’re still learning the deployment side, the Vercel deploy walkthrough covers the basics.
You only need a marketing site. Auth, billing, multi-tenancy — you don’t need any of it. Use a static site generator or a marketing-page template instead of paying for a SaaS starter and deleting 80% of it. A boilerplate’s value is the plumbing, not the landing page; if the plumbing is irrelevant, the price is wasted.
Your product genuinely needs a custom stack. If you’re building something where the database choice, the framework choice, or the auth model is itself the product — an infrastructure tool, an open-source SDK, a vertical-specific platform with bespoke requirements — the boilerplate is fighting you. Start from a clean Next.js install. Boilerplates assume a fairly normal B2B or B2C SaaS shape; if that’s not your shape, the opinions you’re paying for are the problem.
The four kits cluster along two axes. ShipFast and Lovable are speed-first: get to a deployed product in hours, accept opinionated constraints, deal with consequences later. Makerkit and Supastarter are correctness-first: spend an extra day on setup, get an architecture that holds up at 12 months and is legible to AI tools. Neither cluster is right for every founder; the choice depends on whether the next constraint binding you is time or maintenance.
For a solo developer shipping their first paid SaaS in 2026 with Claude Code as the primary author, the synthesis would be: prototype in Lovable for the first 48 hours to confirm the idea moves customers, then rebuild on Makerkit once the workflow has a clear shape. ShipFast remains the right call for founders who want the cheapest credible kit, are comfortable with its opinions, and intend to ship many small products rather than one large one. Supastarter is the answer when teams and seats are part of the product on day one, not in version two. The Claude Code build playbook covers how to structure the workflow once a kit is chosen.
Pick by the constraint that is binding you today rather than the kit you might want in a year. ShipFast at $199 is the cheapest credible route to a deployed Next.js SaaS with the largest community. Makerkit at $299 pays for itself the first week you use Claude Code on a Supabase project. Supastarter at $349 is correct only when multi-tenant orgs are core to the product. Lovable at $25/mo is the right answer if you cannot write Next.js yourself yet.
The stack, prompts, pricing, and mistakes to avoid — for solo founders building with AI.