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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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! :)
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.
