ShipFast alternatives: 7 SaaS boilerplates compared, free and paid

The main alternatives to ShipFast are free, MIT-licensed starters (Seed, Open SaaS, ShipFree, the Next.js SaaS Starter and Ixartz's SaaS Boilerplate) and pricier paid kits (Makerkit and Supastarter). Which one beats ShipFast depends on one question: do you sell to single people or to teams? ShipFast is built for the first; most of the alternatives below differ in how far they go on the second.

I build Seed, one of the seven, so I am not neutral. That is why every fact about another product links to the page it came from, and why there is a section on when ShipFast is the better pick. I read every page on 3 November 2026. A fact is out of date? Open an issue and I will fix it.

What does ShipFast give you for the money?

ShipFast is a Next.js boilerplate by Marc Lou. Its sales page lists $199 for Starter and $249 for All-in, paid once, and $299 with his CodeFast course. You get sign-in with Google or magic links (NextAuth), MongoDB or Supabase, Stripe or Lemon Squeezy, Mailgun or Resend for email, a blog and SEO helpers. The page counts about 8,400 makers and a Discord of 5,000+.

The licence lets you build unlimited projects, commercial ones too, but you may not resell or redistribute the boilerplate, and ShipFast keeps the rights to its code. The licence says nothing about open-sourcing, so ask ShipFast before you publish code built on it.

What the page does not list: groups or organizations, roles, a second sign-in factor, passkeys, an admin panel or translations. For a tool one person pays for, you may never miss them. For a B2B product, they are the first month of work.

The alternatives side by side

"Not listed" means the product's own pages do not mention it, not that it can never be added. Makerkit's prices are its discounted ones; the list prices are $349 and $649. The free edition of Ixartz's boilerplate has no Stripe: payments come with its paid Pro and Max editions.

Which free ShipFast alternative is closest?

ShipFree is the closest copy of the idea: a free Next.js kit that calls itself an alternative to ShipFast, now on Bun, Drizzle and Better Auth, with Stripe and five other payment providers and English, French and Spanish. About 1,700 GitHub stars.

Open SaaS is the most popular free kit here, with about 16,200 stars. It runs on the Wasp framework and brings an admin dashboard, file uploads to S3, Stripe, Polar or Lemon Squeezy, and a docs site.

The Next.js SaaS Starter, also about 16,200 stars, is deliberately small: email sign-in, Stripe Checkout, teams with Owner and Member roles. A base to read in an afternoon, then build on.

Which alternative fits a product for teams?

This is where Seed is strongest, and where I would look before buying anything. In Seed, every person gets a group at sign-up, groups have roles from viewer to owner, and Stripe bills per member, so the price follows the team. Sign-in is done: password, passkeys, sign-in links, Google and GitHub, and an authenticator app as a second factor. An admin panel on its own host finds a person, refunds a payment and writes every action to an audit log. The app works offline and updates in real time, and the whole product speaks nine languages.

All of it runs on one server you rent, with Docker Compose, Postgres and monitoring included, so the bill is a fixed price per month, not one that grows with traffic. Seed is free and MIT-licensed: you can sell, fork or open-source what you build. The comparison table lists 19 capabilities across six starters.

Among the paid kits, Supastarter and Makerkit have organizations too, and Supastarter offers five payment providers, Stripe and Lemon Squeezy among them.

When is ShipFast still the better pick?

• You want Next.js and React, and want to stay in that ecosystem.
• You sell to single users, and want a landing page, payments and a blog live this weekend.
• You want a large community to ask: ShipFast's Discord and its course are part of what you buy.
• You need Lemon Squeezy today. Seed bills through Stripe only; a merchant-of-record provider is an open idea (#584), not a plan.
• You deploy to Vercel or serverless functions. Seed needs a server you control.

And be honest with yourself about Seed's risks: it is a young project with one maintainer, and it runs on Deno today, with Node.js and Bun support still to come.

How to choose in ten minutes

1. Write down who pays: one person, or a team with an admin.
2. If a team: cross out every kit without groups and roles in the table.
3. Pick the stack you can debug at 2 a.m., and the hosting you want to pay for.
4. Open the demo or the repository and click through sign-up before you spend a cent.

Seed's demo is the app you get on day one, with made-up people and data: try it at app.seedsaas.com, then see what running it costs.