Is There a Good Next.js SaaS Boilerplate? Free vs Paid

Yes — and Next.js Has More of Them Than Any Other Stack

Next.js draws more starter kits than any other JavaScript framework, and the create-t3-app documentation puts the reason plainly: it calls Next.js 'the industry standard' for building React applications. That popularity means the ecosystem around it — hosting, auth providers, ORMs, payment SDKs — is unusually mature, so a boilerplate author has more finished pieces to wire together before publishing. It also means the options split cleanly into two families rather than one crowded list.

The first family is free and open-source: create-t3-app, Epic Stack, next-forge and Open SaaS hand you a typed foundation — auth, a database layer, sometimes tests — and let you build the actual product on top. The second is paid and product-shaped: ShipFast, Makerkit, Supastarter and SaaS Pegasus bundle billing, an admin panel and, in some cases, multi-tenancy, so a payable product exists sooner. Neither family is objectively better; they answer different questions about how much you want already decided for you.

What Are the Best Free, Open-Source Options?

Two of the four free picks are Next.js-native. create-t3-app is a CLI — run npm create t3-app@latest — that scaffolds Next.js with only the pieces you select: tRPC for typesafe APIs, Prisma or Drizzle for the database, Tailwind, and NextAuth. Its own docs describe it as deliberately 'NOT an all-inclusive template' — you bring your own billing and admin code. next-forge, started by Hayden Bleasel, goes further: it's a Turborepo monorepo with separate app, web, docs and API workspaces, where auth, database, payments, email, CMS and observability each live behind a swappable package. Both are free and open-source, which makes either a reasonable nextjs boilerplate starting point if you're comfortable adding your own product code.

The other two are close cousins rather than Next.js itself, but they get compared against Next.js kits often enough to belong on the list. Epic Stack is Kent C. Dodds' open-source starter built on React Router rather than Next.js, with passkey and 2FA auth, role-based permissions, and a full Playwright and Vitest test setup — unusually complete for a free kit, though it deploys to Fly.io on SQLite via LiteFS instead of a managed Postgres database. Open SaaS is built on the Wasp full-stack framework, not Next.js, but its live page shows Stripe, Polar.sh and Lemon Squeezy payments, an admin dashboard and file uploads all pre-wired for free — the fullest feature set of any free option here, Next.js or not.

What Are the Best Paid Product-Shell Options?

ShipFast, built by indie hacker Marc Lou, ships as a plain Next.js app using the App Router, Tailwind and DaisyUI, with database adapters for MongoDB or Supabase. Its description lists Stripe payments, magic-link and social auth, transactional email and SEO helpers as pre-wired, priced from $199 one-time according to its own listing. Makerkit targets a different buyer: it offers starter kits for both Next.js and React Router, built on Supabase with a choice of Drizzle or Prisma, and adds real multi-tenant team accounts, role-based permissions, a super-admin panel and — unusually for this market — an included test suite. Its product page states pricing starts at $299 one-time and adds an MCP server plus agent rules for tools like Claude Code and Cursor.

Supastarter also splits its attention: it ships parallel starters for Next.js and Nuxt on a shared architecture, covering auth with organizations, subscription billing and internationalization, which makes it a rare option that doesn't ignore Vue-side founders. Its own site lists lifetime access at €299. SaaS Pegasus is the honest outlier in this list — it isn't a nextjs boilerplate at all, it's a Django kit — but its configurator approach is worth knowing about: you choose React, HTMX or plain templates plus Postgres, Docker and Celery options, and it generates a codebase containing only what you picked, priced from $249 according to its pricing page. It's the option to consider if you're open to trading Next.js for Django in exchange for a mature, config-driven generator.

App Router or Pages Router: What Ships by Default Now?

Next.js has shipped two different routers for a while, and the official docs are explicit about the distinction: the App Router is 'the newer router that supports new React features like Server Components,' while the Pages Router is 'the original router, still supported.' Which one a boilerplate defaults to matters more than it sounds, because auth middleware, data fetching and layout patterns differ between the two.

Among the kits here, ShipFast is explicit about its choice — its own description states it ships as a Next.js app on the App Router. create-t3-app is the opposite case: its documentation maintains separate 'Folder Structure (Pages)' and 'Folder Structure (App)' guides side by side, and its own limitations note advises checking the current default against your preference before scaffolding, since the CLI's default can change between releases. The practical lesson is to check each kit's own docs at the moment you start a project rather than assuming.

Is Billing Wired In, or Something You Add Yourself?

Two of the free foundations ship with no payments code at all. create-t3-app's own limitations state plainly that there's 'no billing, no marketing pages, no admin' — it's a foundation, not a product shell. Epic Stack is the same story: no billing or subscription code included, by design, since it's meant as an application foundation rather than a commerce kit.

The other two free options disagree with that approach. next-forge treats payments as one of its swappable packages, pre-wired alongside auth, database, email and CMS so you configure a provider rather than integrate one from scratch. Open SaaS goes furthest for a free kit: its live page shows pre-configured checkout and webhooks for Stripe, Polar.sh and Lemon Squeezy, letting you 'choose a provider and start cashing out' with no upsell.

Billing is close to the entire pitch for the paid shells. ShipFast bundles Stripe payments as a headline feature; Makerkit offers Stripe or Lemon Squeezy with per-team billing built for its multi-tenant accounts; Supastarter includes subscription billing alongside its organizations feature; and SaaS Pegasus, despite being Django rather than Next.js, ties Stripe subscriptions to its teams-and-invitations system in the same way. Paying for one of these kits is, in practice, mostly paying to skip the payments integration work.

How Do You Choose in Under 10 Minutes?

Start with one question: do you want to write your own architecture, or do you want a shippable shell you configure? If the former, a free nextjs boilerplate like create-t3-app or next-forge is the right starting point — the Next.js & React category page has more scaffolds in the same family. If the latter, go straight to a paid shell: ShipFast if speed matters more than multi-tenancy, Makerkit or Supastarter if you need team accounts and roles from day one.

If your product needs multiple tenants, or you're an agency rebuilding the same SaaS repeatedly, the tenancy and pricing trade-offs across the whole category are covered in more depth in the SaaS Full-Stack Boilerplates buyer's guide, and the split between full-stack frameworks and React-only scaffolds is covered in Next.js & React Boilerplates. If you're specifically weighing whether create-t3-app's free model has any catch, Is create-t3-app free? answers that directly. Ten minutes is enough time to read one kit's own limitations section — that's usually where the real trade-off is stated, not in the features list.

Frequently asked