Build a startup or side project faster with these SaaS templates
hackerstartup.com
hackerstartup.com
So the "Show HN" tag is misappropriated here according to the rules: "Off topic: blog posts, sign-up pages, newsletters, lists, and other reading material. Those can't be tried out, so can't be Show HNs. Make a regular submission instead."
I spent a shameful amount of time fiddling with the configuration before getting it right - all I want is a website that lets me describe everything above, and then generates all that boilerplate crap for me.
A lot of these boilerplate project make strong opinionated decisions which can be in conflict with how you build and structure your project. Meaning whenever you need to make modifications, you'd need to fully go through how it is done and could be counter intuitive to modify.
Also, for starting a SaaS, the initial version is probably better to be as simple as possible rather than a bunch of advanced features. Which means you'd be starting to slash features from the boilerplate at some point.
It should be free, but says it's $300+.
Seems the Vercel enterprise one is that, but the rest just look free and then you have to part with your left kidney when you look closely. Paid is fine of course, but I have many project ideas and most won’t even make a few 100$ in their lifetime and are just for fun, so not worth paying.
You still would need to add Stripe but there are so many examples publicly available that it should be straight forward
Still quite a bit of customisation to do, but was a good starter.
A startup is first and foremost, a business. And it's the business part that's hard/impossible/<insert startup failure rates>. The tech part isn't, and never really has been. It's wonderful that the Great Boilerplate Reduction Crusade continues apace (and AI is going to supercharge this), but it's (almost) orthogonal to building a business.
(I appreciate the title specifies "side project" - much closer to what these are for)
/sits down
The reason why you build from scratch using a framework like Rails, Next, Django, Phoenix or w.e is you build an understanding of your application while building your application. You know how the piece fit together so when a problem comes up or you need to build a new feature you have a full understanding of the application and know how to remove pieces and add pieces to fit the future of the application.
Most of these things aren't even hard to build into you application. The hardest probably being stripe because of webhooks and dealing with the company.
Don't be the hare.
Problems that (may) arise later on can be tackled later on.
The idea that it's desirable, or even possible, to do things "the right way" from the start is a complete fantasy.
Startups fail because their ideas are bad, the market is bad, cash flow isn't right, they have bad luck, they have the wrong people, they lack business skills, etc.
They very, very rarely fail because they use the wrong technology. Indeed, the right technology is the one that gets you to launch the fastest, so you can realize that your genius idea is actually garbage after 3 months instead of 3 years.
Boilerplate templates should be useful for people with experience.
Most likely should not be used by people without experience trying to skip „tech part” without having anyone tech experienced on their ship.
And yet...
I used Petal Pro (https://petal.build/) to build Persumi (https://persumi.com) in three months and Rizz.farm (https://rizz.farm) in six weeks, both in my spare time. It would not have been possible if it wasn't for the boilerplate taking care of things like authentication and user management.
With a bit of digging around, things are pretty straightforward.
Choose a framework in your preferred language, follow the tutorial, and install stripe yourself. It's not hard and then you'll be able to customize and extend it yourself.
Although it's been a while since I've done Django/flask, they're tried, tested, frameworks that have been around for a very long time, and have a large community. They're also pretty low level in comparison to other things in that list. It's very likely that a purely django project can easily be converted to a flask project because it's the same old stuff. Maybe the plugins and libraries will be slightly different, but I would still say it's very doable to convert from one to another.
I've used some of the stuff in the linked site like Prisma. It's a lot of magic. If someone told me that there was a problem somewhere in the process, I'd do my best to delay by a few months and hope that I can switch jobs.
Ironically, quality is the enemy of a startup. You can only do quality once you've got Product Market Fit (very very subjective thing, i understand). The analogy is building a quality, beautiful hotel on Antarctica - it's effectively useless and no one will pay you money you need for it to survive.
Oversimplification is, test, test, test until something sticks. Once something sticks optimize it with quality.
So initially, yes, you need faster, faster, faster.
For example, Avo (https://avohq.io) and Bullet Train (https://bullettrain.co/) are IMHO higher quality than what a typical intermediate developer could accomplish in weeks of full time learning and coding.
If they pick just one wrong tech (that is not the best for your use case, e.g. an over complicated ORM) then they have wasted a bunch of your time.
If you know you work faster without these, then fantastic - off to the races for you. But for every one of you I’ve met in my career, I’ve met 10 of the opposite.
It’s also just a classic line of premature optimization - you will likely rewrite big chunks as you grow and scale anyway, and the sooner you accept that and just focus on getting to market the better.
When you’re not a start-up. (Obviously oversimplifying. But truer than not.)