It is basically a curated template list by the OP, and of which the first entries are affiliate links. There is no functionality to upvote or comment.
So the "Show HN" tag is misappropriated here according to the rules: "Off topic: blog posts, sign-up pages, newsletters, lists, and other reading material. Those can't be tried out, so can't be Show HNs. Make a regular submission instead."
Not to spam HN with yet-another-AI idea, but honestly this kind of scaffolding is where it could really shine. Just earlier this evening, I wanted a project that (a) used typescript, (b) was a monorepo, (c) one package was a library that could be used on either the browser or the server, and (d) another package was a CLI wrapper for the library.
I spent a shameful amount of time fiddling with the configuration before getting it right - all I want is a website that lets me describe everything above, and then generates all that boilerplate crap for me.
You wouldn't lose in the market against a solo-founder with such a tool. You'd lose against that annoying dev that refuses to not build a monolith with Rails or similar and be done with it :)
It may be unpopular but speaking from experience, I think using boilerplates can lead to slower rate of iteration.
A lot of these boilerplate project make strong opinionated decisions which can be in conflict with how you build and structure your project. Meaning whenever you need to make modifications, you'd need to fully go through how it is done and could be counter intuitive to modify.
Also, for starting a SaaS, the initial version is probably better to be as simple as possible rather than a bunch of advanced features. Which means you'd be starting to slash features from the boilerplate at some point.
The Vercel templates are really awesome. I used the AI Chatbot starter (https://vercel.com/templates/next.js/nextjs-ai-chatbot), and it just took me a few hours to build a GPT-4 powered initial screening chatbot tool for a job posting. It asks candidates a few behavioral questions and answers their questions about the role. I had to swap out the auth provider to Google, add a Postgres database for permanent storage, and write an initial prompt, but other than that - the fastest I ever built and deployed something useful.
Any good ones that are actually free with a good license? (MIT or Apache)
Seems the Vercel enterprise one is that, but the rest just look free and then you have to part with your left kidney when you look closely. Paid is fine of course, but I have many project ideas and most won’t even make a few 100$ in their lifetime and are just for fun, so not worth paying.
It might not be the flashiest, but if you want to save time building a CRUD app and avoid dealing with boilerplate code, its hard to beat JHipster. It's super configurable(has its own DSL) and integrates with most services a SaaS developer would be interested in using.
Really hard to find projects related Go and HTMX but I found pocketbase it is based on Go. Interesting and seems promising - https://pocketbase.io/ based on sqllite but great for simple SaaS products
If you want to use Java/Spring Boot, I would start with Bootify.io - it'll save quite some time while adding only code that you require for your project.
This is a sidebar shaking a fist at kids on the lawn, tired old man rant. I find it amusing/eye-twitch-y how much "git init && bootstrap <template>" is conflated with "startup" in the zeitgeist. All these entrepreneurs launching 12 startups in 12 months or 100 startups in 10 years or whatever the micro-saas startup factory literature encourages.
A startup is first and foremost, a business. And it's the business part that's hard/impossible/<insert startup failure rates>. The tech part isn't, and never really has been. It's wonderful that the Great Boilerplate Reduction Crusade continues apace (and AI is going to supercharge this), but it's (almost) orthogonal to building a business.
(I appreciate the title specifies "side project" - much closer to what these are for)
If you are using these to start a SaaS then you are asking for trouble later on.
The reason why you build from scratch using a framework like Rails, Next, Django, Phoenix or w.e is you build an understanding of your application while building your application. You know how the piece fit together so when a problem comes up or you need to build a new feature you have a full understanding of the application and know how to remove pieces and add pieces to fit the future of the application.
Most of these things aren't even hard to build into you application. The hardest probably being stripe because of webhooks and dealing with the company.
> If you are using these to start a SaaS then you are asking for trouble later on.
Problems that (may) arise later on can be tackled later on.
The idea that it's desirable, or even possible, to do things "the right way" from the start is a complete fantasy.
Startups fail because their ideas are bad, the market is bad, cash flow isn't right, they have bad luck, they have the wrong people, they lack business skills, etc.
They very, very rarely fail because they use the wrong technology. Indeed, the right technology is the one that gets you to launch the fastest, so you can realize that your genius idea is actually garbage after 3 months instead of 3 years.
It's not about doing the right thing from the start or picking the wrong technology. It's about knowing the tools you're using and being able to build a good product.
Just like contract templates shouldn't be used by people without legal expertise trying to skip the "law part" without having a legal professional on their team.
But you know that is not an argument against templates legal or software and using templates to have most things set up well from the start to save time of experienced people.
I used Petal Pro (https://petal.build/) to build Persumi (https://persumi.com) in three months and Rizz.farm (https://rizz.farm) in six weeks, both in my spare time. It would not have been possible if it wasn't for the boilerplate taking care of things like authentication and user management.
With a bit of digging around, things are pretty straightforward.
Most are also just reselling other people's free open source work as their own with a fancy marketing page. Don't support thieves.
Choose a framework in your preferred language, follow the tutorial, and install stripe yourself. It's not hard and then you'll be able to customize and extend it yourself.
No it can't. I mean, people can say it, but it's not true.
Although it's been a while since I've done Django/flask, they're tried, tested, frameworks that have been around for a very long time, and have a large community. They're also pretty low level in comparison to other things in that list. It's very likely that a purely django project can easily be converted to a flask project because it's the same old stuff. Maybe the plugins and libraries will be slightly different, but I would still say it's very doable to convert from one to another.
I've used some of the stuff in the linked site like Prisma. It's a lot of magic. If someone told me that there was a problem somewhere in the process, I'd do my best to delay by a few months and hope that I can switch jobs.
> faster, faster, faster. Everything is about speed. When will things be about quality?
Ironically, quality is the enemy of a startup. You can only do quality once you've got Product Market Fit (very very subjective thing, i understand). The analogy is building a quality, beautiful hotel on Antarctica - it's effectively useless and no one will pay you money you need for it to survive.
Oversimplification is, test, test, test until something sticks. Once something sticks optimize it with quality.
So initially, yes, you need faster, faster, faster.
I view your analogy completely different.
There is a set of problems that require excellence from the start. No one will go to your hotel in Antarctica if it’s built like a shack house and they don’t feel safe there!
If you can’t achieve that kind of quality don’t even bother trying to build it.
Quality can be much better with these kinds of templates and frameworks, because the creators can make better default choices, and generally can be aware of more corner cases, compatibility goals, integration testing, and the like.
For example, Avo (https://avohq.io) and Bullet Train (https://bullettrain.co/) are IMHO higher quality than what a typical intermediate developer could accomplish in weeks of full time learning and coding.
This is so highly dependent on the individual developer or team that it is not applicable as blanket advice.
If you know you work faster without these, then fantastic - off to the races for you. But for every one of you I’ve met in my career, I’ve met 10 of the opposite.
It’s also just a classic line of premature optimization - you will likely rewrite big chunks as you grow and scale anyway, and the sooner you accept that and just focus on getting to market the better.
It is not that I am a genius 10xer though! It is more that the traps of using someone else's code and dead ends probably take up as much time as starting from nothing. The hybrid approach is what I really use: stick the starter kit in another repo, play with it, transplant the best bits to the project, leave the stuff you hate. There are more ways to configure a NodeJS app or even front end build than there are atoms in the universe, and some don't play well with each other, so you have to get down and dirty at some point.
I also agree this is the right way to use them. In cases where I didn't do this, I always ended up with some strange bit of the stack that I didn't use and didn't understand how it worked, and it caused some problems later. But copying and pasting relevant working bits into a new repo is a good learning exercise and also gets you going quickly.
When there are consequences for poor quality (security, negligence, reliability, efficiency, etc). When engineering standards are regulated. When quality meaningfully impacts revenue. Take your pick.
So the "Show HN" tag is misappropriated here according to the rules: "Off topic: blog posts, sign-up pages, newsletters, lists, and other reading material. Those can't be tried out, so can't be Show HNs. Make a regular submission instead."