What's the best SaaS starter kit?
I was contemplating Usegravity.app or Saaspegasus.com, I'm pretty open for the language, just want a solid foundation to go fast building my SaaS idea.
I'd be thrilled to have you as a customer, and very happy to answer any questions you have about the Pegasus product, community, etc.
Almost all of the popular boilerplates mentioned here have been created by individuals who are passionate about their frameworks (in my case Django) and have significant experience building products on top of them (in my case 10+ years). Many of us - including myself - are now full time on our products. So you're getting hundreds of hours of work "done for you", plus a steady stream of updates for the cost of what would typically amount to a few hours of our time as a freelancer. But I guess you're already sold on the idea of a boilerplate.
Anyway... my point is, you can't really go wrong as long as you pick one that's backed by someone who is a) experienced, and b) committed. And that's true of myself, Kyle (Gravity), Gabe (DivJoy), Andrew (Bullet Train), Chris (Jumpstart), etc.
You said you're open to the language, but in all honesty I'd say that's the most important decision criteria. Django and Rails and to some extent Laravel are comparable - mature frameworks with lots of batteries included, mostly server-render HTML by default. JavaScript is its own separate beast with a more fractured ecosystem, but tighter integration with the front end. I'm obviously biased towards Python because it's a wonderful language to work with and has a great community and third-party package ecosystem. But honestly, any of these are great choices and will help you launch your first product way faster.
Good luck!
i would say its pretty easy to use, and the examples have helped me learn React functionality. good community that provides a lot of help, and cory (creator) is very responsive when i have needed help.
i don't have any experience with the other products mentioned here, so can't be of help there. i would guess you want to figure out your language first, before deciding which template to go with.
to consider: Stripe integration can be a little complicated to tackle on your own, so if that's a big part of what you are trying to do, i would recommend using a template. not much money and billing is probably not something you want to mess up.
We re-built our SaaS product using this boilerplate and wrote about the experience [1]. TL;DR: would recommend!
[0] https://www.saaspegasus.com/guides/modern-javascript-for-dja...
[1] https://davidkell.substack.com/p/davids-opinionated-guide-fo...
It's very polished. Kept up to date. Follows best practices for RoR. The author is one of the most active RoR community members.
edit:
If you like PHP then https://spark.laravel.com/ is an official Laravel project. I haven't used it but I've seen discussions where folks recommend it.
Also used Hatchbox in another project (startup w customers), it definitely was worth the money.
For fun and giggles: this is what happened when I wanted to quickly build a side project after not coding for a while (using jumpstart to go faster) https://twitter.com/ddccffvv/status/1430967157404340228
I considered this too: https://www.getsjabloon.com/.
In the case you don't have customers, you can often get away with the following for an MVP and it won't take you more than an hour or two:
1. Update your org model (`account`, `company`, `organization`, or `user` object) to have an `active` attribute that indicates if they've "subscribed" or not
2. Create a `subscriptions` table that references your org model
3. Create an `invoices` table that references `subscriptions` and whatever your org model is, a `total_cents` column, a `issued_at` column, a `due_at` column, a `stripe_charge_id` column, and a `paid_at` column
4. Hook this up to Stripe with a simple callback: update the `paid_at` column and the `stripe_charge_id` column
It really doesn't need to be more than that. Once you have customers, you'll have a good reason to invest more time into billing.
* Django → SaaSPegasus has been great. It has a nice (optional) coupling with React. I just signed up a couple days ago and the community is supportive and the out-of-the-box functionality is pretty solid
* React → DivJoy: everything Gabe builds is top notch. It's loaded with high quality integrations. If you're focused on React, this gives you a lot of customization and power.
* PSQL/GraphQL/React → Postgraphile Starter. Pretty amazing if you're willing to take a database-first approach (fully typed end-to-end system in GraphQL, Typescript, React, Next, Postgres) but make sure you know PSQL functions and are willing to track biz logic in a schema.sql file (or use plugins).
* Also checked out Blitz and Nodewood (both look cool). I looked at Bedrock, but couldn't figure out if it was actively maintained/updated (messaged the owner for a version history but never heard back.)
Thanks for bringing it up!
I'm actually in the middle of a pretty big revision of Nodewood from Vue 2 to 3 (you would not believe the number of packages that were abandoned at Vue 2 and never updated to 3, it's like Python 2->3 all over again), but then I'm planning on doing another big blitz with it.
I'd hope you come and check it back out again when that goes live!
In one sense, the starter kit represents a lot of work in front of you: you still have to learn how it all fits together and works, how it might be modified and so forth.
It is likely that you will do better if you are familiar with the framework so I am surprised to hear that the language doesn't matter.
Finally, you want it to embody best practices so that when you do learn it, you can be assured you're learning about the best security, performance and other standards.
So the recommendation should be: this is the best, if you know Rails, this is the best if you know Django, and so on.
The best starter kit is almost an example app that you can copy, so the closer the example is to the final app you have in mind, the less you have to modify it off the bat and the longer you will have to learn it.
https://nodewood.com/ Is another option that I've come across. I've seen usegravity previously but the price is outrageous. As a developer I don't want to pay that much of a premium for stuff I could do myself. Saving a little bit of time, sure. But not at that price.
Or is it better to start with an empty Django project and add Stripe and whatever else you need?
I would think usually Stripe is the only thing you need to add to Django?
User management can be a pain too.
Both are fairly boiler plate.
One big peeve I have of working on apps is that frequently, the backend and frontend are in different languages requiring different libraries and code for common business logic. Nodewood specifically tries to minimize this by using JavaScript for both, and even doing things like keeping database logic out of models, so the models can then be used to store business data and do business calculations on the backend, frontend, wherever.
When you minimize code duplication like this, you not only speed up development, but you reduce your maintenance burden later. For example, you never have to worry about introducing a bug where you update validation logic on the frontend but not the backend.
That said, there are also solutions for this in other frameworks, libraries that dynamically update the page with new server data without much custom coding from you, though they have their limits.
Either way, if this is a priority for you, I'd love your feedback on Nodewood!
Tell me this. How much easier is it to reverse engineer a low code application you built than it is to decide all things that you're customers are going to want?
Makerpad is an excellent place to start this journey. https://www.makerpad.co/
https://tenancyforlaravel.com/saas-boilerplate/
or, i guess, the free stuff is 'tenancy for laravel' - the $$ bolt-on stuff that you actually want/need is called 'saas boilerplate'. that's a bit weird, i think, but not my baby.
i had my two most recent projects built for me (but i prototyped!) -- 'i'/we used laravel with the free built-in starter kits, one with bootstrap, and one with the built-in tailwind (which i'm not a fan of).
i went with Laravel/PHP b/c i wanted the perceived ease of being able to find a PHP hacker. i think i got lucky finding a really good hacker, which is nearly impossible if you don't have a lot of money to spend.
i'd been following saaspegasus for months/years, and feel that would be good/fine. just seems well-engineered, solid, supported, ongoing development, etc.
heard good-ish things about usegravity.
i like that most of these toolkits seem to be doing more on the continuous integration/deployment front - just to take more of the hassle out of getting stuff done.
def don't follow my advice, but my advice would be to pick one and get started, because you're def going to pick the wrong one, and you won't know it until it's too late, so you might as well get started.
in other words, you'll either be a billionaire or not, depending on which framework you choose, so choose wisely.
think of Robert Frost and The Road Not Taken -- you can use the less popular framework, and that will have made all the difference, and/but you'll also look back with a sigh.
so, it's obvious.
Also, I now wake up to a lot less people telling me to "fuck off." :)
I sometimes see websites try them but I cannot remember a single site that kept it going.
I could maybe see using one on a pricing page or something like that, if I couldn't figure out which plan was what I needed.
I've been dedicated to this product for years and provide weekly updates, daily support and video tutorials. I can't do that for free/cheap hence the price. If I charged less, it simply wouldn't be sustainable for me to provide the current level of service and maintenance.
Also, paying a developer to build the same features and invest the time that I have is going to cost a heck of a lot more than $995. It's not just the development hours either, Gravity has been battle tested in over 300+ commercial products and iterated on hundreds of times to incorporate the feedback from those deployments in the field.
LuJam. Disclaimer: I worked there.
I don't have any conclusion about that story.
[1]: Important mention: "monolith" here isn't correlated with "buggy and stateful", you can build a stateless and bug-free monolith, just like you can build stateful and buggy microservices. It just happens to be the pattern they developed.
> 334 Businesses Powered By Gravity
> Web app boilerplate $995
So you can make $300,000 selling a boilerplate? That makes you think.
I’ve never used it. But it was included in a list someone else linked to in this thread.
Maybe not as quick-starty as you want: some learning up front, but might pay for itself over time, depending on how often you want to re-do things for security or performance problems or frequent technology replacement needs. OpenBSD and associated tools seem to have far fewer zero-day or other security exploits than others, the CGI stuff I noted will probalby give great performance, and the Rust language has been written about elsewhere. Admittedly most of my experience is with OpenBSD as a desktop, and other web dev tools, but I'm learning in this direction.
Some possible resources:
I.e., I tend like things that will work well in the long run and relieve me from stack churn or dependency churn & related high maintenance or security headaches, with few or no technical limitations on what is possible.
Edits: for clarity.