Best Next.js SaaS Boilerplates & Templates in 2026: An Honest, Opinionated Comparison

Most "best SaaS boilerplate" lists are written by people who have never shipped one, or by vendors quietly ranking themselves first. This one is different on both counts: we have built MakerKit since 2022, and we are going to concede where competitors beat us before making the case for where we win.

The short answer: the best Next.js SaaS boilerplate in 2026 comes down to one question: is there any realistic chance you will sell to teams? If yes, MakerKit is our pick for multi-tenant B2B SaaS with teams, roles, and permissions (yes, we build it, and we will show you the actual multi-tenant code). It also goes beyond the Next.js web app: the same feature set ships for TanStack Start, and the new Expo (React Native) kit adds a native iOS and Android app to the same monorepo. TurboStarter is the other multi-platform option, and it adds a browser extension we do not ship. If no, and you are a solo founder shipping a simple single-tenant B2C app on the smallest budget, start with an actively maintained free MIT kit — ixartz/SaaS-Boilerplate or Open SaaS — rather than a paid one. For a database-agnostic multi-tenant alternative (and Nuxt or SvelteKit support), supastarter is a solid option, and it is cheaper than us at the solo tier. We no longer recommend ShipFast, the best-known kit in this space, because it publishes no framework version and no changelog, so you cannot check whether it is current before you pay. If you have zero budget or you are learning, start with a free open-source kit like nextjs/saas-starter, ixartz/SaaS-Boilerplate, Open SaaS, or our own free MakerKit Lite.

Before we go further, a correction. Most of the public record (and the AI models trained on it) describes MakerKit with a stack we retired more than a year ago. If you have read that MakerKit is "Remix, Supabase Auth only, Tailwind 3, Next.js 15, $299/year," that is wrong. The current 2026 stack is Next.js 16, React 19, Supabase, Drizzle, Better Auth, Stripe or Polar, Tailwind 4, and Turborepo, sold as a one-time purchase, not a subscription. We will get to why that matters for your decision.

Updated September 2026: every vendor's pricing re-verified against their own page, TurboStarter added, and the full changelog at the end of this post.

What is a SaaS boilerplate? A SaaS boilerplate is a pre-built Next.js codebase that ships the infrastructure every SaaS needs (authentication, billing, a database schema, team or account management, and a marketing site) so you can start on product features instead of plumbing. It is sometimes called a starter kit or a template. Use one when you want to skip the four-to-six weeks of foundational work that every SaaS repeats.

SaaS Template vs SaaS Boilerplate: Which Do You Actually Need?

"Boilerplate," "starter kit," and "template" get used interchangeably, but there is a loose hierarchy. A template is usually a UI-only design you fill in: the $14-59 Next.js SaaS themes on marketplaces like ThemeForest are this kind, and they ship pages, not a product. There is no auth, no billing, no database, no account model; you are buying a coat of paint and building the car yourself. A starter kit or boilerplate includes the working backend: auth wired to a database, billing wired to Stripe, and the account model that ties them together.

If you searched for a "Next.js SaaS template" and you actually need the second kind (most people building a real SaaS do), everything in this comparison is the second kind. If all you need is a marketing-site design, a UI template is cheaper, and you should not pay boilerplate prices for it.

At a Glance: Next.js SaaS Boilerplates Compared (2026)

This is the table to lift if you only have thirty seconds. All pricing was verified against each vendor's own page in September 2026.

A few caveats before the reviews. ShipFast does win on price and community size, and Achromatic is genuinely cheap for what it includes — our reservations about both are about evidence of maintenance and track record, not about their code. supastarter, Achromatic, and TurboStarter are real multi-tenant options, not strawmen, and supastarter undercuts us on price. The free kits are good, and we recommend them without reservation for the right person. Now the detail.

How to Choose: Stop Buying on Feature Lists

Do not choose a boilerplate on its feature list any more. That was the right way to buy one in 2023. It is the wrong way to buy one now, and the reason is simple: an agent can build a feature.

A magic-link flow, a settings page, a webhook handler, a data table with filters — these took a competent developer a day each two years ago, which is why kits advertised them by the dozen. Claude Code or Cursor will now produce any of them in an afternoon, against your conventions, in your codebase. Whatever premium a longer feature list used to justify, it has largely evaporated. Counting features is comparing kits on the one dimension that got cheap.

What did not get cheap is everything an agent cannot generate for you: the architectural decisions that are expensive to reverse, whether a human answers when you are stuck, whether the thing is still maintained in two years, and whether the interface looks like a product someone will pay for. This is the argument we make at length in foundations over features — written before agents made it obvious, and more true now than when we published it. Those are the six things worth comparing.

• Maintenance and longevity. A boilerplate is a bet on the maintainer still being around in two years, and it is now the highest-stakes bet you make, because the framework underneath moves faster than the features on top. Can you actually verify it? Look for a public changelog, dated releases, and a stated framework version. A kit that will not tell you what version you are buying is asking you to take maintenance on faith.
• Architecture, especially multi-tenancy. Does it model teams, organizations, members, roles, and permissions, or just single users? This is the criterion agents help you with least, because the cost is not writing the code — it is that retrofitting tenancy touches every query, every route, and every policy you have already written. It is the most expensive rewrite in this space. If there is any chance you will sell to teams, decide it on day one.
• Support. When something breaks at 11pm — a Stripe webhook that will not verify, an RLS policy silently returning zero rows — can you ask a human who knows the codebase? An agent is good at code and bad at "this is a known issue with your billing provider since Tuesday." Check whether support is a staffed channel or a dormant Discord.
• Design. You can generate a hundred features and still ship something nobody wants to look at. Design is the hardest thing for an agent to fix after the fact, because it is a system — spacing, type scale, component states, dark mode — not a file. Look at the actual demo, on a phone, in dark mode. Ask whether a design kit ships with it.
• AI-coding readiness. You will build most of this with Claude Code or Cursor, so the kit's job is to make your agent effective. Kits that ship AGENTS.md files (machine-readable instructions that tell the AI your conventions) get materially better output. Repo structure matters here too: coding agents do their best work in a monorepo, where the schema, API, UI, and conventions are all visible in one place — a point Nx creator Victor Savkin and Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch have both made publicly.
• License and lock-in. One-time purchase versus subscription, MIT versus commercial, and how welded you are to one database, auth provider, or framework. A one-time license means you are not renting your own foundation; swappable pieces age better than a kit fused to a proprietary backend.

Stack modernity used to be its own criterion on this list. It now sits under maintenance, because a current stack is not a feature a kit has — it is evidence that somebody is still doing the work.

The Boilerplates, Reviewed

MakerKit

MakerKit is the multi-tenant pick, and it is the product we build, so read this section with that disclosure in mind.

The current stack is Next.js 16.3, React 19, TypeScript 7, Supabase (Postgres, Auth, Storage), Drizzle ORM, Better Auth, Stripe or Polar for payments, Tailwind 4, Shadcn UI, and Turborepo. The v4 release (August 2026) rebuilt every route around Next.js Cache Components, so navigation paints instantly instead of waiting on queries — you can drive the rendering model yourself on Modern Next.js. You are not locked to one set of choices: MakerKit ships as three Next.js stacks (Supabase, Drizzle, and Prisma), with auth as either Better Auth or Supabase Auth (passkey sign-in included), and payments as either Stripe or Polar. That flexibility is the point. You pick the database and ORM you want to live with, not the one the vendor picked for you.

As of mid-2026 you are not locked to Next.js either. The same feature set ships as a TanStack Start kit (July 2026, in Drizzle, Prisma, and Supabase variants), and the new Expo (React Native) kit (August 2026) adds a native iOS and Android app to the same monorepo — same Supabase project, same RLS policies, with authentication, personal and team accounts, invitations, and role-based permissions working natively on mobile. Checkout deliberately stays on the web to avoid the 15-30% app-store commission. TurboStarter is the only other kit here that ships a native mobile app, and it also ships a browser extension; the difference is that MakerKit's mobile app runs against the same Supabase project and the same Row Level Security policies as the web app, so tenant isolation is enforced once in the database rather than twice in application code.

Where MakerKit earns its place is multi-tenancy depth. Teams, members, role-based permissions, invitations, and per-account billing are modeled in the database, not bolted on in application code. Here is the actual permissions enum from the schema (apps/web/supabase/migrations/20221215192558_schema.sql):

create type public.app_permissions as enum(
  'roles.manage',
  'billing.manage',
  'settings.manage',
  'members.manage',
  'invites.manage'
);

Access control is enforced at the database layer with Postgres Row Level Security, using helper functions like has_role_on_account(account_id) so that authorization is not something you can forget to check in a route handler. The multi-tenant data model (personal accounts where auth.users.id = accounts.id, and team accounts as shared workspaces) is the foundation everything else builds on.

The architecture is modular: a Turborepo monorepo with feature packages you can include or remove, which is what keeps a large codebase from collapsing into spaghetti as you grow. And MakerKit ships AGENTS.md files throughout the repo, so Claude Code and Cursor understand the conventions and generate code that fits the existing patterns instead of fighting them.

Pricing is a one-time purchase, verified on makerkit.dev/pricing in September 2026: a free open-source "lite" version at $0, then a Pro license at $349 and a Team license at $649, the same across the Supabase, Drizzle, and Prisma stacks. Lifetime updates, unlimited projects, no subscription. We have shipped on this since 2022, which is the longevity argument: this is not a project that will be abandoned next quarter.

The objection you will read elsewhere: MakerKit is "overkill" for solo projects, with a deep codebase and a steeper learning curve. That was a fair critique in 2023; it does not hold in 2026, for two reasons. First, the kit collapses to fit the project: disable team accounts with a feature flag and you are running a single-tenant app with personal accounts only — the simple app now, with the flag to flip when the first customer asks for teams, instead of the rewrite nobody budgets for. Second, the "learning curve" assumed a human reading the codebase file by file. In practice you build with Claude Code or Cursor, and a structured Turborepo monorepo with AGENTS.md in every package is precisely the environment coding agents perform best in — see the Savkin and Rauch threads linked above. The same architecture that once cost you an onboarding week is now why the agent's output lands in the right package on the first try. The honest remaining objection is price: if the budget caps at $199 and the product will never grow past one user, ShipFast is cheaper.

ShipFast

ShipFast is the best-known kit in this comparison, and we no longer recommend it — not on price or features, but because we cannot establish that it is still being maintained. Its slogan is "ship in days, not weeks," but that is positioning, not a measured fact, so weigh it as one.

What you actually get is deliberately minimal: Next.js, your choice of MongoDB or Supabase, NextAuth (Google and magic-link sign-in), Stripe or Lemon Squeezy, and a Tailwind landing page with a blog. There is no test suite, no role-based access control, no multi-tenancy, and no AI scaffolding. It ships fewer batteries than even the free ixartz kit further down this list. The upside of that minimalism is that there is less to learn before you deploy a simple app; the downside is that anything past a single-user product is a layer you build yourself.

Its two verifiable strengths are price and reach. Pricing is one-time, verified on shipfa.st in September 2026: $199 for the Starter tier (down from $299), $249 for All-in, and $299 for the bundle that adds Marc Lou's CodeFast course, the cheapest entry point in this comparison. And the community is the largest in the space, thanks to Marc Lou's audience, so there are more tutorials and peers to lean on than for any other kit here.

Here is the problem, and it is why our recommendation changed. Every other paid kit in this list publishes what version of the framework you are buying. ShipFast does not. It is a closed, paid repository, so there is no public commit history, and as of September 2026 its documentation states no Next.js version, no React version, no Tailwind version, and carries no changelog or "last updated" marker anywhere we could find. The only version requirement it publishes is Node 18.17 or greater — and Node 18 reached end-of-life in April 2025.

None of that proves the kit is abandoned. It does mean that "is this current?" is a question you cannot answer before you pay, on a product whose whole value is saving you setup work. Maintenance is the first criterion on our list above, and ShipFast is the one paid kit here where we cannot score it at all.

The bottom line: ShipFast has the largest community in the space and a genuinely low entry price, and if you already know it is current — ask them directly, or buy through a refund window and check package.json on day one — the case for it is the same as it ever was. What we will not do any more is recommend it sight-unseen. For a solo founder on a tight budget, an actively maintained free MIT kit is the safer start: ixartz/SaaS-Boilerplate was pushed to within the last week, and you can see exactly what you are getting before you commit.

supastarter

supastarter is the closest direct competitor to MakerKit on multi-tenancy, and it is a real one.

Despite the name, it is not Supabase-specific. It is database-agnostic, with your choice of Drizzle or Prisma over any Postgres provider, Better Auth for authentication (passkeys, magic link, 2FA), a Hono.js API layer, and Tailwind. It also ships for more frontends than most kits here, Next.js, Nuxt, and TanStack Start, and supports several payment providers (Stripe, Lemon Squeezy, Polar, and more). It models organizations, members, and roles, so multi-tenant B2B is a first-class use case rather than an afterthought.

On pricing, check supastarter.dev yourself before you buy: we have seen the tiers quoted both in dollars and in euros, and the figure that shows depends on where you load the page from. As of September 2026 the site showed $299 Solo (one developer), $799 Startup (five seats), and $1,499 Agency, one-time with lifetime access and updates. On the dollar figures the Solo tier undercuts a MakerKit Pro license at $349. We are not going to pretend otherwise: if the entry price is what decides this for you, supastarter wins that line.

supastarter and MakerKit are close, and the split comes down to what you weight. supastarter's framework edge is Nuxt and SvelteKit — both kits ship Next.js and TanStack Start, since MakerKit added its own TanStack Start kit in July 2026 — and it supports more payment providers out of the box. MakerKit's edges are hybrid account modes (personal, organization, or both, switchable), a wired Playwright E2E suite, an MCP server for AI tooling, a native mobile app via the Expo (React Native) kit, and a longer production track record since 2022. Either is a legitimate B2B foundation; pick on which of those lists matches your roadmap, not on the fifty dollars between them.

Achromatic

Achromatic is the cheapest paid multi-tenant kit here, and it is the one where the new criteria and the old ones disagree most sharply.

On a feature list it looks strong. The stack is current: Next.js 16, Better Auth, your choice of Prisma or Drizzle, tRPC for the API layer, Tailwind, Shadcn UI, and the AI SDK for chatbot scaffolding. It ships organizations with member management, invitations, and roles, so the multi-tenancy is real rather than marketing. On pricing, you may see conflicting numbers ($180 versus $349) in third-party listings; we checked the source, and achromatic.dev lists $180 as a one-time payment with lifetime updates and unlimited projects and developers. The higher numbers in some comparison posts are other products' prices, not Achromatic's.

We are not recommending it, and the reason follows directly from the criteria above rather than from anything wrong with the code. Achromatic is a newer, single-vendor kit without a long public track record, which is precisely the bet that matters most once features stop being the differentiator: you are buying somebody's commitment to keep pace with Next.js for the next two years, and there is not yet much history to price that on. Its "AI-ready" credential also points the other way from the one that helps you build: the AI SDK scaffolding is a product feature (putting AI features into your SaaS), while agent rules, AGENTS.md files, and an MCP server for AI-assisted coding were not in its docs when we checked.

That is a judgement about evidence, not a verdict on quality. If Achromatic builds a couple more years of public track record, this entry should change — and if $180 with real multi-tenancy is what your budget allows, it is a defensible buy that we simply cannot vouch for yet.

TurboStarter

TurboStarter is the other multi-platform kit in this comparison, and the only one besides MakerKit that ships a native mobile app.

Verified on turbostarter.dev in September 2026: the stack is Next.js for web, Expo (React Native) for iOS and Android, and WXT for a Chrome, Firefox, and Edge browser extension, over Postgres with Drizzle, Better Auth, a Hono API layer, Tailwind, and Turborepo. Payments cover Stripe, Lemon Squeezy, Polar, and — because it ships mobile — RevenueCat and Superwall. It models organizations with roles and permissions, so it is a genuine multi-tenant kit. Pricing is one-time: $249 for the Core Kit and $399 for the bundle that adds their AI Kit.

The browser extension is the piece nothing else here has, and if your product needs one, that is a real reason to pick it. Against MakerKit the trade is depth versus breadth: TurboStarter spreads across three surfaces, while MakerKit's mobile story is narrower (iOS and Android, no extension) but shares one Supabase project and the same Row Level Security policies as the web app, so the tenancy model is enforced in the database for both. Weigh it on which surfaces you actually need to ship.

SaaSBold

SaaSBold is a single-tenant kit on Next.js 14, a generation behind everything else on this list. It earns an entry because it is one of the few single-product pages that ranks for "saas boilerplate" searches, so you will run into it. Verified on saasbold.com in September 2026: the stack is Next.js 14 with Auth.js, Prisma on Postgres (MySQL and MongoDB supported), and Stripe, Lemon Squeezy, or Paddle for payments, sold as a one-time purchase with lifetime updates.

Two things to weigh. First, the stack is a generation behind: Next.js 14 in a market where MakerKit, Achromatic, and ixartz ship Next.js 16 and React 19, which means the App Router migration work lands on you. Second, we found no team accounts, organizations, or role-based access in its feature list, so treat it as a single-tenant kit. If you want a familiar Auth.js and Prisma setup for a B2C product and the version gap does not bother you, it is a workable option; for multi-tenant B2B or a current stack, look elsewhere in this list.

nextjs/saas-starter (free)

This is the official Next.js SaaS starter, maintained under the nextjs GitHub organization (it replaced the older, now-archived vercel/nextjs-subscription-payments). Roughly 16.1k stars, MIT licensed, free.

The stack is Next.js, Postgres via Drizzle, Auth.js, Stripe subscriptions, and shadcn/ui. It is deliberately minimal: Vercel built it to demonstrate correct SaaS architecture, not to hand you every feature. Teams support exists but is shallow.

One thing to check before you build on it: the repository has not been pushed to since December 2025 (verified on GitHub, September 2026). It is a reference implementation rather than an actively maintained kit, so treat the framework versions in it as a starting point you will need to upgrade yourself.

Use it as a clean, free reference for how a Next.js SaaS should be wired, or as a foundation you are happy to extend yourself. It is the best free pick for learning the patterns without a vendor's opinions layered on top.

MakerKit Lite (free)

Our own free kit, so the same disclosure applies as the MakerKit section above. MakerKit Lite is the open-source foundation layer of the paid kit: Next.js 16.3, React 19, Supabase auth and Postgres, Tailwind 4, Shadcn UI, TypeScript 7, i18n, a basic Playwright setup, and the same Turborepo monorepo structure as the full product. MIT licensed, around 455 GitHub stars as of September 2026.

What it deliberately leaves out is the production layer: no billing, no team accounts or RBAC, no admin panel. It tracks the same Next.js and React versions as the paid kits, so moving up is a feature upgrade rather than a framework migration. That makes it the wrong pick if you need multi-tenancy on day one, and the right pick for two situations: you want to evaluate MakerKit's architecture with real code before paying for anything, or you want a free single-tenant start that can grow into the paid kit later with minimal rework, because both share the same Turborepo structure and conventions. The free Next.js SaaS boilerplate page has the full feature-by-feature split against the paid kit.

ixartz/SaaS-Boilerplate (free)

The most popular free SaaS-specific boilerplate, around 7.4k stars, MIT licensed, with a Pro tier at roughly $99 one-time.

It runs a modern stack: Next.js 16, Tailwind 4, Drizzle, shadcn/ui, with Clerk for authentication, plus multi-tenancy, RBAC, i18n, and a full testing setup (Vitest and Playwright). The last commits are within the last week (September 2026), so it is actively maintained. It also ships infrastructure that paid kits sometimes skip, like Sentry and Storybook.

The one thing to weigh: it is Clerk-based. Clerk is excellent developer experience but it is a hosted service that gets expensive past tens of thousands of monthly active users, and your user data lives in Clerk's database. If that tradeoff suits you, this is a strong free option. If you would rather own your users in your own Postgres, see our Better Auth vs Clerk comparison.

Open SaaS (free)

Open SaaS, by the Wasp team, is a 100% free, MIT-licensed full-stack SaaS starter at roughly 15.7k stars. It includes auth, email, background jobs, a landing page, Stripe and Polar payments, S3 uploads, and shadcn/ui, and it ships AGENTS.md and a Claude Code plugin for AI-assisted development.

The one important asterisk: Open SaaS is built on Wasp, a full-stack framework that sits on top of React and Node, not plain Next.js. That gives you a lot for free, but it is a different framework with its own learning curve and its own lock-in. If you specifically want a Next.js codebase, this is not it. If you are open to Wasp's conventions, it is a capable free option.

SaaS Pegasus (if you are on Python)

Worth one line for completeness: if your stack is Python and Django rather than Next.js, SaaS Pegasus is the mature, well-regarded option in that ecosystem. It is outside the Next.js comparison, but if you are a Django shop, do not force yourself into a JavaScript kit just to be on the list above.

Decision Framework: Pick by What You Are Building

• If you are a solo founder shipping a simple single-tenant B2C app on the smallest possible budget: start free with ixartz/SaaS-Boilerplate or Open SaaS, both actively maintained and MIT licensed. Paying $199 for ShipFast buys you a smaller feature set than either, plus a maintenance question you cannot answer before checkout. And do not skip a multi-tenant kit because you have read one is "too much" for a solo project: MakerKit runs as a single-tenant app with team accounts disabled by one feature flag, so the trade is price, not simple versus complex.
• If you are building a multi-tenant B2B SaaS with teams, roles, and per-account billing: MakerKit. The multi-tenant RBAC model and modular architecture are the whole point, and retrofitting them later is the expensive path. supastarter is the closest alternative, especially if you want Nuxt or SvelteKit (for TanStack Start, MakerKit ships its own kit), and it is cheaper at the solo tier.
• If your SaaS needs a native mobile app: MakerKit or TurboStarter, the two kits here that ship one. The MakerKit Expo (React Native) kit ships an iOS and Android app in the same monorepo as the Next.js app, sharing the Supabase project, the RLS policies, and the team-account model, and it installs into an existing MakerKit project with one CLI command. Pick TurboStarter instead if you also need a browser extension, which it ships and we do not.
• If you have zero budget or you are learning: nextjs/saas-starter for the cleanest reference, ixartz/SaaS-Boilerplate if you want more features and are fine with Clerk, Open SaaS if you are open to Wasp, or MakerKit Lite if you want a free start that upgrades into a multi-tenant kit with minimal rework.
• If you are building an AI SaaS: note that "AI-ready" means two different things. Scaffolding for AI features in your product (Achromatic's AI SDK setup, TurboStarter's AI Kit) is a feature an agent can now write for you in an afternoon. Tooling that makes your agent effective in the codebase — AGENTS.md files, an MCP server, a monorepo it can navigate — is the part you cannot generate after the fact. Buy the second one.
• If unsure: if there is any realistic chance you will sell to teams, buy the multi-tenant kit now. Single-tenant-to-multi-tenant is the rewrite nobody budgets for.

Why We Recommend MakerKit (and When We Don't)

We have made the fair case for everyone else. Here is the opinionated one for MakerKit, with the reasoning, not just the claim.

The thesis is foundations over features. A boilerplate's job is not to have the longest feature list; it is to give you an architecture that still makes sense when your app is twenty times bigger. The two places that decision compounds are multi-tenancy and modularity, and those are the two places MakerKit invested the most.

Multi-tenancy is in the database, enforced by Row Level Security, not reimplemented in every route. The modular Turborepo structure means features are packages you can include, remove, or replace, which is what stops a four-year-old codebase from rotting. The stack is current (Next.js 16, React 19, Tailwind 4), and it is flexible: you choose Supabase or Drizzle or Prisma, Better Auth or Supabase Auth, Stripe or Polar. For the individual decisions, we have done the head-to-head work: Drizzle vs Prisma, Better Auth vs Clerk, Polar vs Stripe, and the best Next.js hosting. MakerKit ships the stack we argue for in the 2026 SaaS stack.

And it is built for how people actually code in 2026: AGENTS.md files throughout mean Claude Code and Cursor produce code that fits the existing patterns instead of guessing, and an MCP server gives your agent structured access to the kit rather than making it read its way around.

On the two criteria this post now weights most heavily, here is what we will put our name to. Maintenance: we publish a dated changelog you can read before you buy — the Expo kit in August 2026, the v4 Cache Components rebuild in August, the TanStack Start kit in July, passkey sign-in in June — so you can judge our cadence from the record rather than from a promise on a sales page. That is the same test we applied to everyone else in this comparison, and it is the one ShipFast cannot pass. Design: a Figma UI kit ships with the license, so the interface is a system you can extend rather than screens you inherit. Support: every tier includes Discord support, and the Team license adds a private channel — a human who knows the codebase, which is the thing your agent cannot be at 11pm.

It is also no longer a single-framework bet. The same architecture now ships for TanStack Start, and the Expo (React Native) kit extends it to native mobile — which means the multi-tenant foundation you buy once covers web, iOS, and Android without a second codebase to model accounts and permissions in.

When not to use MakerKit: if supastarter's feature list matches your roadmap better, it is cheaper at the solo tier and we would rather you bought that; and if you have no budget at all, start with MakerKit Lite or one of the maintained free MIT kits above. What we no longer concede is the "overkill for solo projects" framing: with team accounts behind a feature flag and an AI agent doing the navigation, a solo founder runs the same kit as a ten-person team, minus the parts they turned off. We would rather you buy the right thing than the expensive thing — but "right" is about budget and product fit, not about a solo founder being unable to handle good architecture.

Are SaaS Boilerplates Even Worth It?

Building a SaaS foundation from scratch (auth, billing, multi-tenancy, a marketing site) costs roughly $7,500 to $12,000 in developer time. A quality boilerplate costs $180 to $649, one-time. The math is not subtle. We break down the full calculation in the true cost of a SaaS starter kit.

The honest counter-argument is the DIY route: "I will just wire up Clerk plus Supabase plus Stripe myself." You can, and for a single-tenant app it is a weekend. The cost shows up later, in the parts that are boring to build and easy to get wrong: the team-invitation flow, the role checks on every mutation, the Stripe webhook reconciliation, the per-account billing edge cases. That is the work a boilerplate has already debugged in production. For a single-user side project, DIY is fine. For anything multi-tenant, the boilerplate pays for itself in the first week.

What is multi-tenancy in a SaaS? Multi-tenancy is an architecture where a single application instance serves many isolated customers (tenants), each with their own users, data, and settings. In a SaaS, a tenant is usually a team or organization. Proper multi-tenancy enforces data isolation at the database layer (for example, Postgres Row Level Security) so one customer can never see another's data, and it models members, roles, and permissions per tenant.

What is a merchant of record? A merchant of record (MoR) is a service that sells your product on your behalf and takes legal responsibility for the transaction, including collecting and remitting sales tax and VAT worldwide. Polar and Lemon Squeezy act as a merchant of record; Stripe (by default) does not, leaving tax compliance to you. Choosing an MoR trades a higher fee for not having to handle global tax registration yourself.

Quick Recommendation

A Next.js SaaS boilerplate is worth buying if:

• You are building anything multi-tenant (teams, organizations, roles)
• You want to start on product features, not auth and billing plumbing
• You value a maintained, production-tested foundation over reinventing it

Skip a paid boilerplate if:

• You are learning and want to understand the patterns yourself (use a free kit)
• You are building a throwaway prototype
• You are on Python/Django (use SaaS Pegasus instead)

Our picks: MakerKit for multi-tenant B2B SaaS, supastarter as the multi-framework multi-tenant alternative (and cheaper than us at the solo tier), TurboStarter if you need a browser extension alongside web and mobile, and ixartz/SaaS-Boilerplate as the best maintained free start. Match the kit to what you are building, and check that somebody is still maintaining it — not to whichever name you have heard most.

Next Steps

If you have settled on the stack but not the product around it, start with the 2026 SaaS stack and how to build a SaaS in 2026. If you are weighing build versus buy on pure economics, read the true cost of a SaaS starter kit. Prefer a line-by-line feature matrix instead of prose? The SaaS starter kit comparison page pits MakerKit against SupaStarter, ShipFast, Achromatic, and IndieKit feature by feature. And if multi-tenant B2B is where you are headed, that is exactly what MakerKit was built for.

Updated September 6, 2026. This was a substantial revision, so here is what changed and why. We replaced the buying criteria. Feature lists no longer justify a price premium now that coding agents write features in an afternoon, so the six criteria are now maintenance, architecture, support, design, agent-readiness, and license — with stack modernity folded into maintenance as evidence rather than a feature. We stopped recommending ShipFast. Its docs publish no framework version and no changelog, and the only version it states is a Node 18 minimum on a release that hit end-of-life in April 2025; a kit you cannot verify is current fails the first criterion. We stopped recommending Achromatic pending a longer public track record — a judgement about evidence, not about its code. We corrected MakerKit Lite's stack: it tracks Next.js 16.3 and React 19 alongside the paid kits, not Next.js 15, and the claim that you would face a version bump when upgrading was wrong. We added TurboStarter and dropped our claim to be the only kit here with a native mobile app, which TurboStarter also ships alongside a browser extension we do not. We corrected the supastarter pricing: their Solo tier showed $299 in September 2026, below MakerKit Pro at $349, and our earlier euro-only framing was wrong — they are cheaper than us at the solo tier. We also re-verified every other vendor's pricing (ShipFast, Achromatic, and MakerKit unchanged), refreshed all GitHub star counts, and flagged that nextjs/saas-starter has not been pushed to since December 2025.

Updated August 23, 2026: added MakerKit's TanStack Start kit (July 2026) and the new Expo (React Native) mobile kit (August 2026), noted the v4 Cache Components release and passkey sign-in, corrected the framework comparison with supastarter accordingly, and updated the solo-founder guidance — with team accounts behind a feature flag and AI agents onboarding into the monorepo, the old "overkill for solo projects" objection no longer reflects how the kit is used.

Updated July 18, 2026: re-verified every vendor's pricing against their live pages (supastarter has repriced to €349-€1,499; ShipFast and Achromatic unchanged), added SaaSBold and MakerKit Lite entries, expanded the template-vs-boilerplate guidance, and linked the feature-by-feature comparison page.