I Compared Every Paid Next.js SaaS Boilerplate Before Pricing Mine at $99

Last year I built and shipped multiple SaaS apps as a solo founder. Same stack every time: Next.js, Supabase, Stripe, Tailwind, TypeScript. By the fourth app I realized I was re-implementing the same auth flows, webhook handlers, and billing edge cases - so I extracted all of it into a boilerplate and started selling it.

Before pricing it, I bought or audited every major competitor. Here's what I found, including the stuff that surprised me.

The current market (all prices verified)

(Bullet Train is the established Rails option - solid if you're on Rails, but its pricing isn't public anymore so I can't compare fairly.)

If you want the head-to-head details, I keep dedicated comparison pages for ShipFast, MakerKit, and Supastarter up to date separately.

What I learned auditing them

1. Most boilerplate code has never served a real user. This was the thing that genuinely surprised me. A lot of boilerplate code is written for the boilerplate - it demos well, but you become the first production user. The Stripe webhook handler that's never processed a refund-after-dispute, the auth flow that's never hit a Supabase rate limit. You find those edges in production, on your product, on a weekend.

2. You're mostly paying for the author's audience, not the code. The price ladder correlates with brand size, not feature depth. That's not a criticism - distribution is real work - but it means the $649 option isn't 6x the product of the $99 option.

3. The free options are better than people admit, with one catch. Open SaaS is genuinely good. The catch is framework lock-in and that you still inherit untested-in-production billing code - which is exactly the part you don't want to debug live.

Why $99

My boilerplate is 13 packages extracted from apps that are live right now serving 13,000+ users. The auth, billing, and multi-tenancy code has already hit the edge cases - that's the whole pitch. It comes with 2,335 automated tests and 9,383 lines of documentation.

I priced it at $99 because I don't have Marc Lou's audience and I'm not going to pretend the brand premium is mine to charge. What I do have that's rare in this market: the code has provably run in production. Most boilerplates can't show you that; I can show you the live apps.

There's a 30-day money-back guarantee, so the realistic downside is the time it takes you to read the repo.

Honest fit guide

• Buy ShipFast if you want the biggest community and tutorials around your starter.
• Buy makerkit if you need Remix or a team license and budget isn't tight.
• Use Open SaaS if you're price-sensitive and OK with the Wasp framework.
• Buy LaunchSaaS if you're on Next.js + Supabase + Stripe and want code that has actually been to production, at the lowest price in the market.

FAQ

What is the cheapest paid Next.js SaaS boilerplate?

Of the major options, LaunchSaaS at $99 is the lowest-priced paid boilerplate. The next tier up is plainform at $179, then Divjoy and ShipFast starting at $199, with makerkit topping out at $649 for team licenses.

Is a free boilerplate like Open SaaS good enough?

Often, yes. Open SaaS is genuinely well built. The trade-offs are the Wasp framework lock-in and that its billing and auth code hasn't been hardened by real production traffic - the exact code you least want to debug live with paying customers.

What actually justifies the price differences between boilerplates?

Mostly the author's audience and brand, not feature depth. The $649 option is not 6x the product of the $99 option. The useful filter is provenance: has this exact code processed real payments and real auth edge cases in production?

How do I verify a boilerplate's code has run in production?

Ask the author which live products use it and check them. LaunchSaaS is extracted from apps currently serving 13,000+ users, ships with 2,335 automated tests, and the live apps are linked from the site - that's the evidence standard worth demanding from any vendor.

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