A boilerplate can save you weeks of setup time on auth, billing, email, and landing pages. We compare the top options and help you decide whether to buy or build.
Research-based overview. This article synthesizes public documentation, pricing pages, and user reports. We have not built a production application with every tool we cover; where first-person testing exists, it’s called out explicitly. How we research.
ShipFast is the best boilerplate for solo founders building B2C SaaS products. At $199 for a one-time purchase, it gives you authentication, Stripe billing, email integration, SEO optimization, and a polished landing page—all built on Next.js and Supabase. You can go from purchase to a deployed MVP in a single weekend.
Makerkit is the better choice for B2B SaaS products that need multi-tenant team management, role-based access control, and a more enterprise-oriented architecture. Priced at $299–349, it is more expensive but includes features that ShipFast does not: organization switching, team invitations, and a modular plugin system.
SaaS Pegasus is the top option for Python developers building on Django. If your tech stack is Python rather than JavaScript, Pegasus provides a mature, well-documented Django boilerplate with Stripe integration, team management, and a choice of frontend frameworks.
“A $199 boilerplate that saves you two weeks of setup work is not an expense—it is an investment in shipping faster.”
Every SaaS application needs the same foundational features: user authentication, subscription billing, transactional email, a landing page, a dashboard layout, and basic SEO. These features are not your product’s unique value proposition, but they consume a disproportionate amount of development time. Setting up Stripe subscriptions alone—webhook handling, plan management, customer portal integration, proration logic—can take a full week for a solo developer.
A SaaS boilerplate gives you all of this pre-built. You clone the repository, configure your environment variables (Stripe keys, database URL, email provider credentials), and you have a working application with auth, billing, and a professional landing page. The time savings are real: what would take two to four weeks from scratch takes two to four hours with a good boilerplate.
The trade-off is that you inherit someone else’s architectural decisions. If the boilerplate uses Supabase for auth and you wanted Clerk, you either adapt or fight the framework. If it uses Tailwind CSS and you prefer something else, you are stuck with Tailwind. For most solo founders, these trade-offs are acceptable—the point is to ship fast, not to have a perfect architecture.
Boilerplates are not ideal for every situation. If your SaaS has highly unusual architecture requirements—a real-time multiplayer experience, a complex marketplace with escrow payments, or an application that does not fit the standard dashboard-and-billing model—a boilerplate may add more friction than it removes. You will spend time ripping out features you do not need and restructuring the application to fit your use case.
They are also less useful if you are an experienced developer who already has a personal starter template. Many seasoned solo founders maintain their own Next.js starter with their preferred auth, billing, and deployment configuration. If you already have this, buying a boilerplate adds little value.
ShipFast is created by Marc Lou, a well-known indie hacker who has built and launched multiple SaaS products. The boilerplate reflects his philosophy: ship fast, validate quickly, iterate based on customer feedback. It is opinionated, lean, and designed to get you from zero to a deployed product in the shortest possible time.
ShipFast is built on Next.js 14+ with the App Router, Supabase for authentication and database, Stripe for billing, Resend or Mailgun for transactional email, and Tailwind CSS for styling. It deploys to Vercel with zero configuration. The stack is modern, well-documented, and widely supported by the developer community.
ShipFast costs $199 for a one-time purchase. This includes lifetime access to the repository, all future updates, and a Discord community of other founders using the boilerplate. There are no recurring fees, no per-project licensing, and no limits on how many products you can build with it.
At $199, ShipFast pays for itself if it saves you more than a single day of development time. For most founders, it saves at least a week. The economics are compelling.
ShipFast is designed for solo B2C products. It does not include team management, organization switching, or role-based access control. If you are building a B2B SaaS where customers need to invite team members and manage permissions, you will need to build those features yourself or choose a different boilerplate. The code is also tightly coupled to Supabase—switching to a different database or auth provider would require significant refactoring.
Makerkit is a more enterprise-oriented SaaS boilerplate designed for B2B products with team functionality. It is built by a small team of developers who have shipped multiple B2B SaaS products and understand the specific requirements of multi-tenant applications.
Makerkit offers two variants: one built on Next.js with Supabase, and another built on Next.js with Firebase. Both use Stripe for billing and Tailwind CSS for styling. The Supabase variant is more popular and is generally recommended for new projects, as it provides better Row-Level Security integration and a more open ecosystem.
Makerkit is priced at $299 for the Starter tier (one project) and $349 for the Complete tier (unlimited projects, priority support). Like ShipFast, this is a one-time purchase with lifetime updates. The higher price reflects the additional B2B features and the modular plugin architecture.
Makerkit’s complexity is both its strength and its weakness. The multi-tenant architecture, plugin system, and role-based access control add a layer of abstraction that can be confusing for new developers. If you are building a simple B2C product, Makerkit’s team management features are unnecessary overhead. The learning curve is steeper than ShipFast’s, and the initial setup takes longer.
SaaS Pegasus is the leading SaaS boilerplate for the Python/Django ecosystem. If your backend is Python—whether for machine learning integration, data processing, or simply because you prefer the language—Pegasus is the gold standard. It has been actively maintained since 2019 and has a mature, battle-tested codebase.
SaaS Pegasus is priced at $249 for a personal license (one project) and $749 for a team license (unlimited projects). Like the other boilerplates, this is a one-time purchase with lifetime updates. The team license also includes priority support and early access to new features.
Choose SaaS Pegasus if your team’s primary language is Python, if you need Django’s robust ORM and admin interface, or if your SaaS involves data-heavy backend processing where Python’s ecosystem (pandas, scikit-learn, etc.) provides a real advantage. Do not choose Pegasus just because it is available—if you are comfortable with JavaScript and Next.js, the ecosystem and community support around ShipFast and Makerkit are significantly larger.
The alternative to buying a boilerplate is building your own foundation from scratch. In 2026, this is more feasible than ever thanks to AI coding assistants like Cursor, Claude, and Lovable. You can prompt an AI to scaffold a Next.js application with Supabase auth, Stripe billing, and a Tailwind landing page—and get a working result in an hour or two.
The advantage of building from scratch is total control. You choose every library, every architectural pattern, and every design decision. There is no inherited code to understand, no unnecessary features to remove, and no framework-specific conventions to learn. For experienced developers, this control is worth the extra time.
The disadvantage is the long tail of edge cases. A boilerplate has been tested by hundreds or thousands of users. The Stripe webhook handling has been debugged across every edge case—failed charges, disputed payments, plan downgrades, proration. The authentication flow handles email verification, password resets, session expiry, and cross-device login. Building all of this yourself means discovering and fixing these edge cases one by one, often in production.
Our recommendation: if you are building your first SaaS, buy a boilerplate. If you are building your fifth SaaS and have a proven starter template, build from scratch. The edge case knowledge you gain from the first four products is what makes building from scratch viable.
| Feature | ShipFast | Makerkit | SaaS Pegasus | From Scratch |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $199 (one-time) | $299–349 | $249–749 | Free (your time) |
| Framework | Next.js | Next.js | Django | Any |
| Auth | Supabase Auth | Supabase / Firebase | Django Auth | DIY |
| Stripe billing | Yes | Yes | Yes | DIY |
| Team management | No | Yes | Yes | DIY |
| Landing page | Polished | Included | Basic | DIY |
| Blog / SEO | MDX blog | Plugin | Basic | DIY |
| Admin panel | No | Yes | Django Admin | DIY |
| Setup time | 2–4 hours | 4–8 hours | 4–8 hours | 2–4 weeks |
| Best for | Solo B2C SaaS | B2B team SaaS | Python developers | Experienced devs |
| Community | Large Discord | Growing | Niche | N/A |
The boilerplate market has matured significantly in 2026. Two years ago, most boilerplates were rough around the edges—poorly documented, infrequently updated, and built on outdated patterns. Today, products like ShipFast and Makerkit are genuinely well-engineered codebases that reflect best practices in the Next.js ecosystem. They are updated regularly, have active communities, and include comprehensive documentation.
If you are a solo founder starting a new SaaS project today, our strongest recommendation is to buy ShipFast, customize the landing page, add your core product features, and launch within a week. The $199 investment will save you at least two weeks of setup work—time better spent talking to customers, iterating on your product, and finding product-market fit. Do not let infrastructure setup delay your launch.
For Django developers, SaaS Pegasus remains the gold standard. And for those who want maximum control and already have the experience to build efficiently from scratch, AI coding tools have made that path more viable than ever. But for the majority of founders, a boilerplate is the pragmatic choice.
The stack, prompts, pricing, and mistakes to avoid — for solo founders building with AI.