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Comment by reactordev | Hacker News Reader

This is cool but very opinionated on which frameworks to use, etc. it’s a good start but I want to see one with Golang + fiber + htmx + templ. Or bun, or with svelte or vite, but these can be changed out if you already know. Starred, looking forward to see where this goes as I think we need more “baseline” stacks to help people navigate sprint 0.

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Being opinionated is a core feature of a boilerplate.

The problem is how it's labelled as a true generic solution instead of being a JS SaaS boilerplate. Developers often either have specialisations or preferences, and luckily we have more than one option for each kind of application.

See SaasPegasus for a good example. Clearly Django oriented. I have my own boilerplate for my work in Laravel, but I don't brand it as the new saas kid on the block.

No gripes against OP, looks like a neat setup. Just the messaging reads to me off. Like it's focusing on the OSS side of it in a weird way. Plenty of boilerplates exist out there that aren't paid solutions, and all stack their own preferred dev tools that are majority open source. It's as if this were a product called "peanut flavoured peanut butter".

Thanks for the feedback! I see your point; we could make it clearer from the start that it is JS-oriented. I'm coming from that world, so it seems like I took it for granted.

Also re OSS positioning - I'm actually not aware of modern (but maybe I missed it), polished SaaS starters such as the paid ones that got really popular lately (e.g. supastarter, shipfast), so that's what prompted us into that kind of messaging. We'd like to create a community-driven starting point for developers of equal polish and quality.

I'm a bit blindsided by "got really popular lately" - these projects would be relevant to my work but they've completely slipped under my radar. Whereabouts are you hearing about those projects? Or (alternatively) where else are you talking about your project?

Also heard about shipfast on twitter and reddit. Twitter is big for promoting solopreneur stuff like this.

On a side note, LinkedIn has a lot of frequent posts if you follow certain projects. LlamaIndex is killing it on this front. Lots of great stuff and they even teamed up with Andrew Ng with advanced RAG techniques on deeplearning.ai

Twitter mostly! I am following a bunch of folks in indie hacker / building in public space. Also reddit

Any podcast recommends?

I'm not a huge podcast person, somehow always prefer a more concise blog post.

It’s not just JS-oriented it’s React-oriented. So those JS-oriented folks that know Svelte, Vue, etc instead would benefit from clearly stating that.

Still, it looks cool despite not knowing React myself. I might take it for a spin when I have some free time :) thanks for building this

not related to your post at all, but thinking how cool it would be to have Jelly-flavoured Peanut Butter.

I like opinionated boilerplates. I can adapt to working in different ways. Having someone else decide a reasonable architecture is something I don't mind at all.

Opinionated enough that you have to learn their bespoke language WASP

Wasp generates code. It's a bit odd how even with such a big layer of indirection, you only have one choice of backend language. Though I'm personally happy with JS and want to give this a try.

Wasp is actually being developed with a vision of being stack agnostic. Currently, it's only React/Node, but we've already been playing with Python and Rust internally.

Ah, I missed that from the FAQ at the bottom.

Wasp is as easy as learning to write JSON when you already know JS.

Doing JS and JSON for many years. But react based frameworks are still are mystery for me and break everything I love about HTTP and HTML.

Calling it as easy as JSON for JS dev sounds a bit stretched. For a react Dev maybe.

They problem is in the translation and control. There's also extra tooling and steps in the build process to be maintained.

Yeah that's a bit much.

Opinionated enough that you have to learn their bespoke language React

People learn what they are eager to

Part of what makes React's JSX so nice is that it's based on familiar things, HTML and JS. Like, regular HTML <div> etc works the same there.

I agree, JSX (and also MDX) are a really great paradigm

If you - or others here - are interested I can spend some time to clean-up my own "boilerplate" a bit.

It's using Golang + Chi + Templ, uses SQLite as its database and has a multi-tenant-multi-db setup by default (i.e. 1 master database for user/tenant management, and "stem-data", 1 sqlite database per tenant), and uses passkeys for authentication. I'm using some HTMX + Hyperscript + a really small amount of plain-js for passkeys in the apps themselves.

I reckon that switching out Chi for Fiber - for the boilerplate only - would take about 90 minutes.

Edit: Forgot to include TailwindCSS. So for completeness sake.

I am interested. I actually like Chi so no need to take it out. Are you open to sharing it ?

Yes, the more baseline boilerplates we have to show more golang the better.

+1 for Golang + fiber + htmx. Big fan of this stack, plus maybe some AlpineJs as needed.

Recently looked at templ-great features, but somewhat awful looking generated code.

Yeah me too. I built this exact stack for myself as a template. Alpine, go-fiber, htmx.

Thanks for your support! Yes, the stack is currently fixed (React, Node, Prisma), and I understand developers might have specific preferences.

We'd definitely like to make it more flexible (also in the sense of UI frameworks, etc), but that's something we'll have to figure out step by step.

Yeah I wish a lot more of these boilerplates didn't go the react route or atleast offered a vanilla JS option.

noted! If you went with vanilla JS, is there any specific library you'd use for interactivity?

Generally I hew to the htmx + alpine, as I'm a djangonaut but pure vanilla js without library would be excellent too. Because I otherwise like the choices of technologies you've used. Astro is cool and been meaning to tinker with it, stripe of course (though I'd argue you should incorporate getlago instead so people aren't vendor-locked to stripe / getlago you can still use stripe just helps adaptability in case stripe goes weird). Plausible analytics is nice, much better than GA imo. Sendgrid is what I'd normally reach for so that makes sense. Tailwind is what I use for css always so that's great too. So it really is just the lack of a vanilla JS (or lightwight js library like htmx/alpine, etc.) that would prevent my personal adoption of this saas. I know you're using Wasp or planning on using Wasp to implement e.g. authentication etc. which makes sense. But I can't help but wish there was a way to be backend agnostic (not easy I'm sure) such that I could use e.g. django. It would open up a lot more potential customers if you did want to e.g. provide commercial support to people who adopt this open-source saas. Anyway, best of luck eh and good work so far

super helpful, thanks for your thoughts! Yeah, stack-agnostic is hard but not something we're opposed to. Especially if we also manage to get the community interested and involved, which is the goal with the OSS approach.

Also first time I'm hearing of the term Djangonaut, love it! :)

Vanilla JS

They don’t understand the power of webcomponents and custom tags, templates, and document.querySelector().

https://saasstartupkit.com/

Close?

Close as in it uses golang, sure… but that’s about it. Other than a few packages and the AWS sdk, everything else is old web app architecture. SQL database. Go template html. Not modern.

Looks like it has not been updated in 3yrs

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