However, as I've become more comfortable in the Django and python ecosystem, I have been cutting closer and closer to the stock install.
I think the cookie-cutter stuff is great for when you have a highly-opinionated way to do things (specific test frameworks, databases, patterns, etc).
Some feedback:
Authentication:
I looked at your way of authentication, and I kindly ask you take a look at djoser [1]. They have a nice authentication system for DRF with a password reset flow.
Or also maybe an integration with Auth0?
Storage:
If you replace boto3 with Apache's libcloud [2], then you make this project a little more platform agnostic. I say this as someone who works across multiple platforms. I see that django-storages even plays nicely with it also [3].
And to be honest I'm not so thrilled with Heroku as the deployment target. Maybe just beef up the README with instructions on getting started just on my laptop with pip, cookie-cutter, and docker-compose?
All in all, nice job. I'll add my star to your project and consider it next time the use case arises.
[1] - https://github.com/sunscrapers/djoser
[2] - https://libcloud.apache.org/
[3] - https://django-storages.readthedocs.io/en/latest/backends/ap...