What Is a SaaS Boilerplate? Everything Developers Should Know
Before you can even begin building your actual product, there’s a long list of foundational work that needs to happen first. Authentication, database configuration, billing infrastructure, email delivery, and a scalable project structure all have to be in place before a single customer-facing feature exists. For most SaaS founders, that setup alone can consume weeks. That’s exactly why SaaS boilerplates exist. This guide explains what a SaaS boilerplate is, what features matter, how it differs f
Before you can even begin building your actual product, there’s a long list of foundational work that needs to happen first. Authentication, database configuration, billing infrastructure, email delivery, and a scalable project structure all have to be in place before a single customer-facing feature exists. For most SaaS founders, that setup alone can consume weeks.
That’s exactly why SaaS boilerplates exist.
This guide explains what a SaaS boilerplate is, what features matter, how it differs from a starter kit, and what separates a serious production-ready foundation from a simple template in 2026.
What Is a SaaS Boilerplate?
A SaaS boilerplate is a pre-configured application codebase that already includes the common systems almost every SaaS product requires. Instead of building infrastructure from scratch, you start from an existing foundation and focus directly on the product itself.
The term “boilerplate” originally came from the printing industry, where standardized metal plates were reused to reproduce the same content repeatedly. In software development, boilerplate refers to code that developers end up rewriting across project after project.
A SaaS boilerplate bundles that repetitive work into a reusable framework.
Every SaaS product shares a familiar set of requirements:
User accounts and authentication
Payment processing
Database management
Email workflows
User dashboards
Security and permissions
Those systems are necessary, but they are not the product you’re actually trying to build. They are infrastructure.
A good boilerplate gives you that infrastructure on day one so you can configure it, connect your services, and start shipping features immediately.
What Does a SaaS Boilerplate Include?
Not all boilerplates are equal. The difference between a basic template and a production-ready SaaS foundation comes down to how many real-world problems it already solves.
Authentication
Authentication is one of the most sensitive and critical parts of any SaaS product. A complete implementation should include:
Email/password signup and login
OAuth providers like Google or GitHub
Password reset flows
Email verification
Session handling
Optional magic link login
Two-factor authentication for B2B applications
Authentication is not something you want to build from scratch unless you specialize in security. Strong boilerplates rely on established systems like Auth.js, Clerk, or Supabase Auth.
Subscription Billing
Most SaaS products rely on Stripe, but there’s a major difference between “Stripe connected” and a fully operational billing system.
A real billing implementation should include:
Subscription checkout flows
Multiple pricing tiers
Upgrade and downgrade logic
Cancellation and reactivation handling
Failed payment recovery
Stripe webhook processing
Customer billing portal access
Webhook synchronization is where many custom setups break. If billing events are not reflected correctly in your database, users can end up with access they shouldn’t have or lose access they paid for.
Reliable billing infrastructure matters far more than most founders realize early on.
Database Configuration
A production-ready SaaS boilerplate should already include:
A configured ORM like Prisma or Drizzle
Core user/account/session schemas
Migration tooling
Environment-based database configuration
Without migrations and structured schema management, maintaining your application becomes increasingly risky as the product evolves.
Multi-Tenancy
Multi-tenancy is one of the defining features of a real SaaS boilerplate.
Instead of storing data only per user, multi-tenant systems organize data around companies, organizations, or workspaces. Every customer account becomes isolated from every other customer.
A proper implementation should support:
Organization creation
Team invitations
Permission roles
Data isolation between tenants
Organization switching for multi-account users
Adding multi-tenancy after launch is difficult, expensive, and risky. It’s one of the architectural decisions that needs to exist from the beginning.
Marketing Page
A boilerplate should not stop at backend infrastructure. Most modern SaaS products also need a marketing website connected to the product itself.
A solid setup usually includes:
Hero sections
Feature showcases
Pricing tables tied to Stripe
Testimonials and social proof
CTA components
SEO configuration and Open Graph metadata
This matters because your landing page is often the first real interface customers see.
User Dashboard
After login, users need an application shell where your actual product features live.
Most boilerplates include:
Sidebar or top navigation
Account settings
Subscription management
Workspace management
Reusable dashboard layouts
The goal is to provide structure so you only focus on product-specific functionality.
Email Infrastructure
Transactional email is mandatory for modern SaaS products from day one.
A quality boilerplate includes templates and provider integration for:
Welcome emails
Password resets
Workspace invitations
Billing receipts
Failed payment notifications
Common providers include Resend, Postmark, and SendGrid.
Developer Tooling
The best SaaS foundations also invest heavily in development quality and maintainability.
Important tooling includes:
TypeScript configuration
ESLint and Prettier
Environment variable validation
CI/CD setup with GitHub Actions
Unit testing with Vitest
End-to-end testing with Playwright
Error monitoring with Sentry
Structured logging
This tooling saves time long-term and helps teams scale without accumulating technical debt too quickly.
What Is the Difference Between a SaaS Boilerplate and a Starter Kit?
The terms “starter kit” and “boilerplate” are often used interchangeably, but there is usually a difference in scope.
A starter kit typically provides:
Basic project structure
Dependency setup
Framework configuration
It gets the application running, but most product infrastructure still needs to be built manually.
A SaaS boilerplate usually goes much further by including:
Authentication
Billing
Database setup
Multi-tenancy
Landing pages
User dashboards
Email systems
A starter kit gets you from zero to a working application.
A SaaS boilerplate gets you from zero to users signing up, subscribing, and actively using your product.
The terms “starter kit” and “boilerplate” are often used interchangeably, but there is usually a difference in scope.
A starter kit typically provides:
Basic project structure
Dependency setup
Framework configuration
It gets the application running, but most product infrastructure still needs to be built manually.
A SaaS boilerplate usually goes much further by including:
Authentication
Billing
Database setup
Multi-tenancy
Landing pages
User dashboards
Email systems
A starter kit gets you from zero to a working application.
A SaaS boilerplate gets you from zero to users signing up, subscribing, and actively using your product.
You’ll also see related terms like:
SaaS template
Next.js SaaS starter
SaaS kit
In practice, they all refer to similar concepts with different levels of completeness. The important part is not the name, it’s what functionality is actually included.
How Do SaaS Boilerplates Save Development Time?
Honestly, quite a bit, but only in some scenarios.
Where the time savings are real
Authentication is always a time sink for developers. Setting up a proper auth mechanism with oauth, email validation, password reset, and session management generally takes one to two weeks per developer to accomplish thoroughly. With a boilerplate, you get a proper auth mechanism within a single day.
Integrating with Stripe is always easy, but Stripe webhooks are always hard. Setting up Stripe webhooks correctly to handle the creation of subscriptions, updating subscriptions, canceling subscriptions, payment failures, and keeping the database in-sync requires one to two weeks.
Setting up multi-tenancy is always a time sink. Designing your database schema for multi-tenancy and implementing your queries accordingly is not possible if you haven't thought about it from the beginning. With a boilerplate, you implement that upfront.
Creating HTML/CSS-compliant email templates still takes longer than expected. Email clients support a very limited subset of CSS, and creating emails in such a way that they look decent on Gmail, Outlook, and Apple Mail still takes time.
Realistic time savings
According to many developers who've worked both with and built boilerplates, a boilerplate can save a significant amount of time upfront (roughly four to six weeks). Any decent developer rates make the financial case for a paid SaaS boilerplate clear.
But for a solo founder or a small startup, the time savings are just as valuable. Validating an idea in four weeks instead of eight weeks could be the difference between closing your startup and finding product-market fit.
Where time savings are smaller
Boilerplates won't really give you time savings on the actual product development side. The core features, the particular schema, and the user interface still take the same amount of time upfront. What boilerplates allow is stripping out time-consuming, undifferentiated development work.
Should I Buy a SaaS Boilerplate or Build from Scratch?
There's a simple answer to that question. But let's discuss both sides of the coin.
Reasons to use a boilerplate
You've built auth and billing functionality previously, and you know how to set it up quickly. Reusing your previous work via a boilerplate shouldn't be considered cheating.
The product you are building is the top layer. If your idea involves the core feature being the product, then setting up the auth system is unnecessary busywork.
Time to market is critical. The faster you validate your product in the market, the better. Getting started fast is always more important than starting from scratch.
Your team is small (or you work alone). The smaller the team, the more expensive the initial development is.
Reasons to build from scratch
Your technical requirements are unique or non-standard. Some boilerplates might force you into implementing certain features or using a specific technology stack, which can be suboptimal.
Learning how to build the entire infrastructure is your primary goal. Boilerplates are meant to be used for rapid development, so using them for learning doesn't make much sense.
The options available to you are not compatible with the rest of your infrastructure. For example, choosing a boilerplate that is built using Next.js will not help your team that works only with React and Flask.
Honest verdict
For the majority of SaaS products, using a boilerplate is the right move to make. Unless the team decides otherwise, boilerplates provide a high return on investment.
Just remember that a good boilerplate does not mean understanding all the technicalities. If you are going to use a boilerplate that employs certain programming patterns, you need to understand what they do. Otherwise, debugging will become extremely difficult.
Why Should You Prefer a SaaS Boilerplate Over a Codebase?
Besides saving development time, there are three key reasons why most teams should prefer a boilerplate over building everything from scratch.
Proven code patterns
The author of a boilerplate has already gone through the same trouble of building infrastructure, and a good boilerplate encodes their experience. Implementing a solution for Stripe events that is thread-safe, writing secure sessions for authentications, or creating efficient queries for multi-tenancy is not always easy.
Using an existing boilerplate means you are reusing proven knowledge.
Uniformity and consistency
Using boilerplates with multiple developers makes it easier to create consistent codebases. Each component follows a specific pattern, API routes use consistent naming conventions, and the new team member can understand any part of the codebase quickly because of it.
When building from scratch as a team, consistency is always harder to achieve without predefined conventions.
Maintaining an existing boilerplate is collaborative work
Active boilerplates are usually kept up to date, and the author fixes any security holes found in the third-party libraries. Once a new version of Next.js comes out, the boilerplate's author will update the boilerplate and document any breaking changes that require attention.
The downside of this benefit is that inactive boilerplates do not provide it. A boilerplate that hasn't been updated for 18 months won't help with updating.
Is It a Good Idea to Build a SaaS Using a Boilerplate?
It's a good idea when:
You're building a regular SaaS product (either B2C or B2B). Your product requires authentication, billing, multi-tenancy, and other features included in the boilerplate.
You need to minimize development time. Using boilerplates allows you to skip time-consuming development steps.
You are a small team with limited time or budget.
It's a bad idea when:
You're using a boilerplate without reviewing it. Make sure that you understand what's happening in a boilerplate before using it.
You pick boilerplate based on a feature list alone. Boilerplates vary greatly in their code quality, and simply choosing based on the number of features is always wrong.
You consider a boilerplate a finished product. Remember, all boilerplates are intended for customizing further.
You're choosing a boilerplate that isn't maintained anymore. Using an unmaintained product might lead to security issues or bugs.
The risk people underestimate
Boilerplate means taking on technical debt in the form of decisions made by someone else. Once your product is up and running, changing the database schema, the ORM you use, the authentication mechanism, or even the whole framework becomes a massive problem.
That is not a reason to avoid boilerplates entirely. It's more of a reason to understand what you are working with.
What Is the Best Free Open-Source SaaS Boilerplate?
There's more than one great free boilerplate. The following options are suitable in different scenarios and for different teams.
ixartz SaaS Boilerplate
The most complex free boilerplate for Next.js. Supports authentication via Clerk, multi-tenancy with teams, authorization roles, internationalization, landing page, user dashboard, forms, SEO, analytics and error tracking via Sentry, testing, continuous integration/continuous deployment, and user impersonation.
Stack: Next.js 15, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, Shadcn UI, Clerk, Drizzle ORM, Stripe GitHub: github.com/ixartz/SaaS-Boilerplate Best for: Teams that value comprehensive free boilerplate for their multi-tenant SaaS product.
Vercel Next.js SaaS Starter
Official boilerplate provided by the Next.js community. It's intentionally minimal and supports only the most basic features. Provides authentication, Stripe subscriptions, a PostgreSQL database implemented via Drizzle ORM, and a basic dashboard.
Stack: Next.js 15, TypeScript, Tailwind, Drizzle ORM, PostgreSQL, Stripe, Auth.js Where: vercel.com/templates/next.js/next-js-saas-starter Best for: Teams looking for minimal boilerplate to extend on their own.
Apptension SaaS Boilerplate
Unique SaaS boilerplate implemented in a completely different tech stack compared to other boilerplates. Supports React frontend, Django backend, Stripe payments, multi-tenancy, email templates, and CRUD scaffolding with an integrated CI/CD pipeline. The authors have noticed how many times the same set of features appear again and again in client projects and thus decided to create a boilerplate.
Stack: React, TypeScript, Django, Python, PostgreSQL, AWS, Stripe, Contentful GitHub: github.com/apptension/saas-boilerplate Best for: Teams skilled in Python and Django that want a boilerplate with AWS integration.
BoxyHQ SaaS Starter Kit
Open-source and free SaaS boilerplate focusing specifically on enterprise-compliance-related features. Such features as SAML SSO, directory sync, and audit logging are rarely implemented in other boilerplates but are vital when targeting bigger companies.
Stack: Next.js, Tailwind, Prisma, PostgreSQL GitHub: github.com/boxyhq/saas-starter-kit Best for: Teams developing B2B Saas aimed at large companies.
When open-source boilerplates won't cut it
In some cases, free SaaS boilerplates won't meet your needs. The problem with them is that most are outdated and unmaintained, which makes implementing new features a challenge.
That's when it's worth evaluating a paid boilerplate like Kostra. It was made for teams developing real products, not just experimenting, and thus implements billing, authentication, multi-tenancy, and clean architecture.
Additionally, the boilerplate comes with documentation to help maintainability. If boilerplates have been wasting too much of your team's time on implementing trivial features, Kostra can be a good investment.
FAQs
What is a SaaS boilerplate?
SaaS boilerplates are pre-made codebases that cover every feature a SaaS product needs: user authentication, billing, database schema and structure, multi-tenancy, landing page, and user dashboard. A boilerplate allows developers to skip building infrastructure and instead focus on core features.
What is the meaning of boilerplate?
The term "boilerplate" originates from the 19th-century newspaper industry, where steel plates with the same text are reused across many publications. Later, lawyers applied the term to legal documents. When it comes to software, boilerplate refers to code that is often repeated across many projects.
What does SaaS stand for?
SaaS is short for software as a service and describes software services available to users over the internet, requiring no installations on user's device. Users pay for accessing software through browser or dedicated app on a monthly or yearly basis.
Is Netflix a SaaS?
Netflix is a software as a service. Netflix delivers streaming capabilities via a website or dedicated app to paying subscribers.
However, PaaS (platform as a service) refers to cloud services, such as AWS, Google Cloud, and Heroku, used for hosting software.
Even though Netflix relies on AWS to run its services, it remains SaaS for end-users.
Where can I find SaaS boilerplates on GitHub?
Finding SaaS boilerplates on GitHub is quite easy. Simply type in the keywords mentioned below.
saas boilerplate
nextjs saas starter
saas starter kit
next.js saas template
Sorting the results by "most stars" will reveal the highest-quality boilerplates, while the last commit date will ensure they are being actively maintained.
Best boilerplates available on GitHub at the moment:
ixartz/SaaS-Boilerplate
boxyhq/saas-starter-kit
apptension/saas-boilerplate
What is the best SaaS boilerplate?
The best SaaS boilerplate depends on your team's needs and preferences. A boilerplate that is great for beginners will be less useful for professional SaaS development, etc.
Some of the best SaaS boilerplates are as follows.
ixartz SaaS Boilerplate. Comprehensive free boilerplate for Next.js with extensive functionality.
Vercel Next.js SaaS Starter. Minimalist, officially backed boilerplate that covers essential SaaS functionality and helps to start quickly.
BoxyHQ SaaS Starter Kit. Open-source boilerplate for building enterprise SaaS with additional features such as compliance.
Kostra. Production-ready boilerplate for building real SaaS products. Implements billing, authentication, multi-tenancy, and clean architecture with full documentation.
Are there any free SaaS boilerplates?
Absolutely. There are plenty of free SaaS boilerplates out there. Some of them are free open-source solutions, while others come preconfigured and are offered for free by the provider.
Some of the best free SaaS boilerplates include:
ixartz SaaS Boilerplate.
Vercel Next.js SaaS Starter.
BoxyHQ SaaS Starter Kit.
Apptension SaaS Boilerplate.
While free boilerplates will cover all your needs for building SaaS, you might encounter certain difficulties when maintaining and scaling them. That's where paid boilerplates such as Kostra come into play.
What is Apptension SaaS Boilerplate?
Apptension SaaS Boilerplate is an open-source solution for building your SaaS product quickly. The difference between other boilerplates lies in the fact that Apptension SaaS Boilerplate is built in the React and Django stacks. It includes support for authentication, billing, multi-tenancy, email templates, and subscription management. Boilerplate also comes with an out-of-the-box CI/CD process and can be installed via npm init saas-boilerplate.
Are there any boilerplates for Python SaaS?
There certainly are SaaS boilerplates for Python. Some of them include:
Apptension SaaS Boilerplate. Free boilerplate written in React on the front-end and Django on the back-end. Covers everything related to SaaS.
SaaS Pegasus. Paid boilerplate developed since 2020. Offers auth, billing via Stripe, multi-tenancy, roles and teams, admin panel, background task processing using Celery, and AI integrations.
What is a SaaS boilerplate template?
SaaS boilerplate template is a generic name for a pre-made starting point for creating a SaaS product. While not every boilerplate is a template, virtually all templates are also boilerplates since they share many similarities.
