SaaS boilerplates sell the same week: auth, billing, teams, email — pre-wired so you start at the product. ShipFast owns the indie-hacker tier; Supastarter and Makerkit bring more architectural seriousness across Next.js/Supabase stacks; create-t3-app is the free, opinionated floor for developers who want type-safety without the billing wiring. All assume one thing: a developer who'll live in the code. The generation path — describing the product to Greta — replaces the template with a build: the same auth/billing/teams scaffolding arrives already shaped to your product, not a demo app you rename. Boilerplates are the right buy for developers with strong opinions; generation is the right path when the code was never where you wanted to spend the week.
The boilerplate market exists because every SaaS ships the same first 20%: sign-in, subscriptions, team invites, transactional email, a settings page. Paying a few hundred dollars to skip that week is rational — the honest question is what you're left holding, and who on your team can hold it.
How we compared
Stack quality and update cadence, what's genuinely wired vs demo-wired, license terms, the rename-the-demo problem, and who can actually use it. Prices checked September 2026 — one-time license prices in this market shift with every launch cycle; verify live.
At a glance
| Option | Stack | Best for | Cost shape |
|---|---|---|---|
| ShipFast | Next.js + common SaaS wiring | Indie hackers shipping fast | One-time license, ~$200-300 |
| Supastarter | Next.js/Nuxt + Supabase | Teams wanting cleaner architecture | One-time license, ~$300 |
| Makerkit | Next.js + Supabase/Firebase | Multi-tenant seriousness | One-time license, ~$300 |
| create-t3-app | Next.js + tRPC + Prisma | Developers, free, no billing wiring | Free (OSS) |
| Greta | Generated per product | The app itself, not a starting point | Free tier; $20/mo ($5 welcome) |
The boilerplates, honestly
ShipFast is the marketing phenomenon of the tier, and the product under it is real: auth, Stripe, email, landing components, shipped by someone who ships. Its code style is indie-pragmatic — fine for solo speed, occasionally winced at by teams with review standards. Supastarter and Makerkit are the grown-up entries: cleaner separation, real multi-tenancy patterns, documentation that assumes you'll maintain this for years. create-t3-app is the free floor and proud of what it excludes — you get the type-safe skeleton and wire billing yourself, which is either an afternoon or a fortnight depending on who's asking.
The shared fine print: a boilerplate is a codebase you now own. Updates arrive as diffs you merge by hand once you've diverged (you diverge immediately — that's the point). And every screen starts as the demo product, so week one is really renaming someone else's app while trying not to break its assumptions.
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The generation alternative
The boilerplate bet is "the first 20% is generic, so buy it." Generation makes a different bet: none of it needs to be generic, because scaffolding can be built to order. Describe the product to Greta — "team workspaces, three subscription tiers per our entitlement sheet, invite-only registration, usage metering on exports" — and auth, billing wiring, team logic and the actual product screens generate together, already yours, no demo to unrename. The entitlement guide and SaaS MVP guide cover the two descriptions that matter most. Pricing stays flat: 30 free credits a month (5 a day), then $20/month ($5 with the current welcome offer) — notably less than a boilerplate license before the first render.
The honest boundary, both directions: a strong developer with stack opinions and years of maintenance ahead may genuinely prefer owning a Makerkit-grade codebase from day one. A founder whose product is the point — not the plumbing — was never the boilerplate's customer, even when they bought one.
FAQ
Are SaaS boilerplates worth it? For a developer shipping multiple products on one stack, usually yes — the license amortizes in a weekend. For a one-product founder without deep stack opinions, the demo-renaming week plus permanent maintenance often costs more than it saved.
What's the best free SaaS boilerplate? create-t3-app for the type-safe skeleton; you add billing and teams yourself. Free in license, not in wiring time — budget accordingly.
Boilerplate or AI app builder — which ships faster? For the generic 20%, they tie. For the other 80% — your actual product — the boilerplate hands you an empty editor and generation hands you a first working version. Where you want to spend the week is the real question.
Can I export code from a generated app? Ask any builder this before committing, and run the answer through a real acceptance test — our code export acceptance test is the checklist we'd want used on us.
