For indie hackers who ship.
Your SaaS scaffold,
done in 5 minutes.
Not 2 weeks.
One command. Auth, payments, database, email, Tailwind, Docker, CI/CD — wired together, tested, production-ready. Stop building the same foundation for the fourth time and start building the product.
The problem
You’ve been here before.
It still sucks.
Paid boilerplates sell you a black box.
You drop $300 on a "production-ready" boilerplate. Then you're untangling someone else's abstraction choices, their custom auth wrapper, their bespoke hook system. Every customization costs you an hour of archaeology. You didn't buy a head start. You bought a dependency.
Free OSS starters are already six months out of date.
The GitHub star count looks great. The last commit is from eight months ago. The auth library deprecated the function it relies on. The Prisma schema conflicts with the ORM version that actually installs. You spend a day just getting it to run.
Even the good ones skip the hard parts.
Auth and a landing page aren't a SaaS. The hard parts are billing — Stripe webhook handling, subscription state, upgrade/downgrade flows. Multi-tenant data isolation. Transactional email. A CI/CD pipeline that doesn't break on the first merge. Most starters stop at "here's a login page."
What you get
Everything you’d build anyway.
Already built.
Authentication
~$200 of setup timeClerk or NextAuth pre-configured. Social logins, magic links, session handling, protected routes, middleware. You pick the provider at init time. It works on first run.
Data Layer
~$150 of setup timeDrizzle ORM with migrations ready to go. Postgres, SQLite, or Supabase — choose at init. Schema for users, accounts, and subscriptions included. Type-safe queries out of the box.
Payments + Email
~$400 of setup timeStripe or Lemon Squeezy — full webhook handling, subscription lifecycle, billing portal integration. Resend or Postmark for transactional email. Both wired to real events, not placeholder console.log.
Infrastructure + UI
~$250 of setup timeTailwind + shadcn/ui component library pre-installed and themed. Dockerfile for production. GitHub Actions CI/CD pipeline. 250+ tests covering auth, billing, and API routes.
Total if you built it yourself
~$1,000+ in developer-hours
What saas-init costs
$0
Free. Open source. MIT licensed. npx saas-init@latest and it’s yours.
How it compares
Why not just use ___?
Good tools. Different jobs.
- ✗Opinionated — tRPC, specific stack baked in
- ✗No payments, no email, no auth wiring
- ✗You still build the SaaS layer yourself
- ✗Bare minimum — just Next.js scaffolding
- ✗No auth, payments, email, or infra
- ✗You wire everything yourself, from scratch
- ✗Clone the repo, then manually configure everything
- ✗Templates are static — includes code for providers you won't use
- ✗Not designed to be regenerated or updated
- ✗Adds individual UI components to an existing project
- ✗No concept of auth, payments, or infra
- ✗Solves a different problem entirely
Transformation
Here’s what changes.
Day 1
Quick Win
You run one command. You answer five questions. Five minutes later you have a running Next.js SaaS with login, billing, database migrations, email, Tailwind, Docker, and CI. You push to GitHub. The pipeline goes green. This part used to take you two weeks.
Week 1–2
Compound
You’re not debugging a Stripe webhook at 11pm. You’re writing the feature that makes your product different. The scaffolding is invisible — which is the point. Every hour you don’t spend on infrastructure is an hour you spend on product.
Month 1–3
Advantage
You ship an MVP while the person who bought the $300 boilerplate is still reading the documentation. You’re collecting feedback, iterating, closing your first paying customers. You have 250 tests. They have none.
End of Year
10x
You shipped three SaaS projects this year instead of one. One didn’t work — you killed it in week four. One is growing. One is profitable. That’s the math that only works when you stop rebuilding the same foundation.
How many more projects are you going to delay?
You don’t need another week of setup. You need five minutes and one command. The repo is open. The code is yours. There’s nothing to lose and a week of your life to gain.
No account. No email required. MIT licensed. Works on macOS, Linux, Windows.