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Should You Use an Open-source SaaS Boilerplate Starter or a $300+ Paid One?

SaaS boilerplate starters became a very popular thing in the web dev community, and also a pathway to a luxury lifestyle for those behind them, sometimes making north of five figure amounts per month.

Twitter screenshot

On the other hand, there’s also been a rise of the open-source SaaS boilerplate starters, that cover various stacks and offer similar features as their paid counterparts, but completely for free and with an active community alongside.

So, what’s the catch? Why pay $300 or $500 for something that you can simply get for free? Are there any trade-offs you should be aware of, and what are the pros and cons of each option?

As it usually turns out in the real world, the answer isn’t completely black and white and depends on what you need (your requirements) but also what you want (your personal preferences).

The goal of this article is to break these further down and give you an objective, simple framework to follow when choosing a boilerplate starter for your next project. So, let’s get into it!

Why a sudden craze with all these starters? SaaS-es are not a new thing at all

We have all been building web apps and SaaS-es for decades, you may rightfully observe, so why this became a thing just now? It seems like everybody is making their own starter today and getting a ton of excitement (and money) from the community.

The answer is that the complexity of building a SaaS (or in another words, a web app) in the last ten years increased tenfold. Partly it is due to the evolution of the underlying architecture (we switched from monolithic, server-based approach to “rich client ↔ backend”) which introduced more moving parts into the equation, and partly due to the explosion of options for each part of the stack.

If you were about to build a SaaS fifteen years ago, you pretty much knew you’d go with either Ruby on Rails, Laravel, or Django, depending on which language and community you preferred. These would come as a batteries-included solution, give you their best defaults and you’d be up and running in a matter of hour(s). You got a single, well-tested path to follow and not much decisions to make.

If you sit down and try to do the same today, your head would probably get dizzy after a few hour(s) of merely reading about all the possible options you could go with:

  • What to use for the frontend? Something mainstream as React, Vue or Angular, or something more sexy and bleeding edge like Svelte or Solid?
  • Should I use a React framework e.g. Next or Remix? Or just go with React + Vite?
  • Do I need SSR and SSG? Or should I just stick with CSR?
  • What should I use as an API layer? Good ol’ REST, or maybe GraphQL, or maybe even typesafe RPC?
  • What to choose for the backend? Do I use something lightweight like Express.js with Node/Bun/Deno or a full-blown solution such as Nest.js/Django/Rails? Or maybe finally try Phoenix/Livewire combo everybody has been talking about? Do I go serverless or not?
  • What about the database and ORM? Relational or non-relational? Should I write raw queries or use a full-blown ORM such as Drizzle and Prisma? If yes, which one?
  • What are my hosting options? Am I going to get locked in with a single provider? What if I want/need to host my app somewhere else?

These are just some of the questions you need to start thinking about when deciding how to start your SaaS in 2024. As you can see, it’s more then enough to make your head spin and even if you’re a seasoned developer and makes you feel like you need to be a rocket scientist to figure out the right combination.

This is why people today turn to SaaS boilerplate starters and gladly even pay for it. It means somebody else did the legwork and (hopefully) made a sensible decision on the stack which will remain current and easy to maintain in the years to come.

Now that we gave some context to the sudden rise of SaaS starters, let’s back to the original question - why pay for something when there is an open-source, free version of it? Let’s take a look at some of the factors that come to play.

With an open-source SaaS starter, you know exactly what you’re getting into

By the definition of open-source, you can see and examine the full code of the starter in advance, before committing to using it for your project.

Although it’s not likely you will go through every line of code beforehand and try to understand it all (that’s why you’re looking for a starter in the first place), you can check it out and see how you like it - e.g. the style of the code, readability and how well documented and tested it is.

You can also see the repository’s activity stats - number of open and closed issues, features in progress, commit frequency and how fast are things being resolved and new features added.

Open SaaS screenshot

Paid, closed-source starters, again by definition, offer at best a fraction of these benefits. You can see the value proposition as the author designed it - some hand-picked testimonials, a demo and potentially have a peek at the docs.

With a paid starter, you become a member of an exclusive tribe (aka Air Jordans Effect)

The most popular paid boilerplates today often come from well-known developers, or “indie makers,” who’ve already built successful products. Buying their boilerplate feels a bit like joining an exclusive club—it’s as if you’re tapping into their expertise and using the same tools they once used to succeed.

Marc promo banner

It’s like wearing a jersey signed by a famous athlete or a perfume co-created by a pop star. It won’t guarantee instant success, but it gives you a sense of connection and inspiration. You’re reminded that someone else turned these same tools into something great—and that you could do it too!

In the long run, this mindset might matter even more than the tools themselves. When things get hard, feeling part of that “club” could be what keeps you going, and taking your idea one step further.

Security: in open-source, everyone is a reviewer

Paid boilerplate starters are mostly an effort of a single person. It is the type of project that, past the initial development phase, doesn’t require a full-time attention and is more of a seasonal nature (e.g. updating libraries to the latest versions). That makes it a perfect workload for a single person and also makes it much more profitable rather than splitting the margin with the team. If there was a whole team behind, it probably wouldn’t cost $500, but rather $2000.

Dave Shipfast tweet

Recently, there was a security incident with one of the popular paid starters that allowed external parties to send unauthorized web hook requests, which caused a lot of ripples in the online community of builders.

It is a good reminder that, while it’s important to ship quickly, security isn’t something that can be skipped over. And while nobody can guarantee the security of any SaaS starter, be it paid or open-source, the fact is that in open-source projects there are much more people involved in both development and code review. Since the code is freely available, you’re also free to review it yourself, use any pen-testing tools on it or ask another expert to check it before committing to it.

With a paid SaaS starter, the bus factor is 1, with open-source you get the full community support!

A paid SaaS starter typically depends on a single maintainer. Since the code is closed source, nobody else has access nor rights to it, and if for any reason the author becomes unable or unwilling to continue working on it, that’s the end of the story. No support, updates, nor anybody to turn to with questions.

On the other hand, an open-source boilerplate starter like Open SaaS is a living organism, with a number of contributors behind it. As with any open-source project, there will typically be a smaller core team which does the bulk of the work and steers the project (and that might as well be a single person in the start), but anybody can join at any point, and they will. As the project grows and becomes more used, more and more people will start adding fixes and features they need themselves and take ownership of the specific parts.

Open source stats from opensaas

Another thing to account for is it takes a long time for SaaS starter business to become more than a side income, and only a fraction of builders will ever come to that point. That means most of boilerplate creators will still have a full-time job or other engagements going on. Which means they will have a limited time for customer support and adding new features.

Open-source SaaS starter === unlimited updates. Closed source? Sometimes.

An another direct benefit of the SaaS starter code being open-source is that you will have an immediate access to all the updates, as soon as they get released. That includes both security patches, version bumps and completely new features.

Commits to open saas

With closed source, it varies a lot from one starter to another. Some offer updates as an upsell (e.g. basic and pro tier), some offer a limited time updates (e.g. 1-year), and some promise a lifetime of updates.

Free updates vs pay for everything

With a paid SaaS starter, you might need to buy a “license” for every new app

Another thing to be aware of is that, with paid starters, there often might be a limit to the number of apps you are allowed to start with a single starter purchase. It is typically phrased in terms of “licenses”, and if you exceed a limit you’re legally required to buy a new one, although you already own the starter code.

Boilerplate licenses

Again, this is not the case with all paid starters (some offer unlimited projects with a single purchase), but it is a common pattern worth checking before buying.

With an open-source starter, there naturally isn’t any such limit - the full source code is publicly available and you’re free to use it in any way you see fit.

With an open-source SaaS starter, you can add new features yourself!

One of the most exciting benefits of the open-source approach is that anybody can contribute! If there is a feature you’re missing or want to improve, you can simply do it yourself it and create a pull request. Then, the core maintainers will review it, give advice and point you in the right direction if needed. Once it gets merged, it is available for everyone to use!

Community contributions

Summary

Now that we have gone through the main differences between open-source and paid SaaS starters, let’s give it a bird’s-eye view:

CostLifetime updatesUnlimited appsMaintainersCommunityAir Jordans EffectEasily contribute
Open-source SaaS starter$0YESYESManyBig, publicRarelyYES
Paid starter$300+DependsDependsTypically oneSometimes, privateOftenNo

This is a useful list to be aware of when making a decision which route to go, but in the end there is no one answer that will fit all. Your decision will depend on what exactly you’re looking to build and which tech stack you prefer using.

Also, the factors above will not be equally weighted by everyone - one person might be excited about being a part of a wider community and being able to easily contribute to the project, while other most appreciate the fact there is a strong online personality they can follow and get inspired.

In the end, the only important thing is to take action and successfully ship that application you’ve been thinking about for so long. Good luck!

We Made the Most Annoying Cookie Banners Ever

We at Wasp just finished off a fun little hackathon where we asked our users to create the most annoying cookie consent banners they could think of (because cookie banners aren’t annoying enough already, right?). Then we let our community pick the winner in an elimination style tournament on X/Twitter.

It was a lot of fun, and the submissions were really creative, so we thought we’d highlight some of our favorites for you, including the community chosen winner. Check ‘em out below. We hope they inspire you… to… not use them on your own sites. :)

The GDPR Quiz

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is the EU’s data privacy law that requires websites to get explicit consent from users before collecting their data through cookies.

GDPR is the reason we have cookie consent banners today.

This submission by Cam Blackwood gets to the core of why cookie consent banners are annoying: they force users to make a decision about something they barely understand (or care about), based on a regulation they probably don’t even know exists.

Thanks for the reality check, Cam.

Windows of Time

Do you ever feel like cookie consent banners are UX design pattern from the past? Well, this submission by Lazi confirms that, by sending you through an operating system time machine to a past we’d all like to forget.

Disturbing, yet oddly comforting.

Find all the Cookies

There are some sites that make rejecting cookies a real pain, as if you were trying to find a needle in a haystack, or as if you were looking at a Where’s Waldo puzzle.

This submission by Fecony, Wasp community meme lord, is just that. We find it annoying and fun at the same time, but what we’re not sure about is if it’s even possible to find them all.

Well played, Fecony.

Fresh Batch of Cookies

Most of us probably just smash the “accept” or “reject” button without even reading the fine print. But Henry Boyd is a maniac and with his submission, you have to accept ALLLLL the cookies.

And that’s a whole lot of cookies.

What’s more annoying than cookie consent banners? Probably job applications. Well [Wardbox], community builder extraordinaire, combines the best (or worst) of both worlds to make the cookie mangament process even more tedious than you could imagine.

Now all we have to do is wait for the rejection email.

Grand Prize Winner: Gangnam Style Beat

Our community-chosen winner’s submission pretty much speaks for itself.

Make sure you turn on the sound for this one!

🎤 Eeeeh, sexy cookie. Op! op-op-op! 🎵

And there you have it!

Thanks to everyone who participated! We had a lot of fun looking at all the submissions and we’re glad to see that the community is as creative (and annoying) as ever.

And now for a quick PR announcement:

At Wasp we’re working hard to build a modern, open-source full-stack React/NodeJS framework.

The easiest way to show your support is just to star the Wasp repo! 🐝 It helps us spread the word and motivates us to keep building.

friendly handshake

Thanks for reading, and showing your support!

🍪 THE MOST ANNOYING COOKIE BANNER EVER HACKATHON 🤬

What kind of hackathon is this?

The goal here is simple. Make THE MOST ANNOYING COOKIE BANNER you can think of.

Cookie consent banners annoy us all. So we thought, why not have some fun with them? Here are a couple examples of what that might look like:

  1. The Cookie Consent Wheel of Fortune:
Consent wheel
  1. The “Hit Enter When the Red Ball is Over the Accept Button to Consent” Banner:
Enter to win

Now it’s time for you to get creative. Btw, if you’re looking for some inspiration, check out these Ridiculous Volume Slider UI’s.

Prizes

2 winners will receive a nice mechanical keyboard, an additional annoying gift, as well as a shoutout on our socials.

The 2 winners will be selected by:

  • The Wasp team
  • Our Community (Discord & Twitter)

The community will get a chance to vote in a battle royale style elimination tournament, where two banners will go head-to-head and the winner will advance to the next round.

Keyboard

(The brand/style will depend on the winner’s location, but we’ll do our best to find one with a Wasp look and feel 😃)

How to participate

  • Fork the Annoying Cookie Banner Stackblitz Template

    • If you prefer to work in your own editor, just click on the Create a repository button after you fork the template
  • When finished with your banner, click on Share in the top left, and in the Embed tab, click Copy URL with the following settings:

    Share
  • Next, edit the MOST-ANNOYING-COOKIE-BANNER.md file on the Open SaaS repo.

    • Enter your GitHub username followed by the embed link you copied from Stackblitz
    • Note: after you create a PR, the Wasp team will add the ANNOYING COOKIE BANNER label to it.
  • Make sure you also ⭐️ star the Open Saas repository to be eligible to win!

Deadline & Results

Submit your PR before the 21st of October to be eligible to win!

Be sure to join our Discord or follow us on Twitter/X for updates and the final results!

Let’s annoy our users! 🚀

Let’s create the most annoying cookie consent banner and have some fun! This hackathon is your chance to show off your creativity and tech skills. We’re super excited to see what wild ideas you come up with.

Remember, this is all about having fun and pushing the boundaries of user interface design!

Let the annoyance games begin! 🎉

How I Built & Grew CoverLetterGPT to 5,000 Users and $200 MRR

Hey, I’m Vince…

Vince Headshot

I’m a self-taught developer that changed careers during the Covid Pandemic. I did it because I wanted a better career, enjoyed programming, and at the same time, had a keen interest in IndieHacking.

If you’re not aware, IndieHacking is the movement of developers who build potentially profitable side-projects in their spare time. And there are some very successful examples of IndieHackers and “solopreneurs” out there inspiring others, such as levels.io and Marc Lou.

This thought of being able to build my own side-project that could generate profit while I slept was always attractive to me.

CoverLetterGPT

So I’m happy to report that I’ve finally done it with my first software-as-a-service (SaaS) app, CoverLetterGPT.xyz, which I launched in March 2023!

I’ll be the first to admit that the results aren’t spectacular, but they’re still something I’m very proud of:

  • over 5,000 registered users
  • $203 monthly recurring revenue (MRR)

Below, I’m going to share with you how I built it (yes, it’s open-source), how I marketed and monetized it, along with a bunch of helpful resources to help you build your own profitable side-project.

What the heck is CoverLetterGPT?

CoverLetterGPT.xyz was an idea I got after the OpenAI API was released. It’s an app that allows you to upload a PDF of your CV/resumé, along with the job description you’re applying to, and it will generate and edit unique cover letters for you based on this information.

It also lets you save and manage your cover letters per each job, making it easy to make and apply to multiple jobs without having to keep copy and pasting all your important info into ChatGPT!

What’s the Tech Stack?

Tech Stack

CoverLetterGPT is entirely open-source, so you can check out the code, fork it, learn from it, make your own, submit a PR (I’d love you forever if you did 🙂)… whatever!

I built it using the Wasp full-stack framework which allowed me to ship it about 10x faster.

Why?

Because Wasp as a framework allows you to describe your app’s core features in a main.wasp config file. Then it continually compiles and “glues” these features into a React-ExpressJS-Prisma full-stack app for you.

All you have to focus on is writing the client and server-side logic, and Wasp will do the boring stuff for you, like authentication & authorization, server config, email sending, and cron jobs.

BTW, Wasp is open-source and free and you can help the project out a ton by starring the repo on GitHub: https://www.github.com/wasp-lang/wasp 🙏

star wasp

⭐️ Star Wasp on GitHub 🙏

For the UI, I used Chakra UI, as I always do. I like that it’s a component-based UI library. This helps me build UI’s a lot faster than I would with Tailwind or vanilla CSS.

For payments, I used Stripe, (I’ll go into the details of monetization below).

The Server and Postgres Database are hosted on https://railway.app, with the client on Netlify.com’s free tier.

By the way, If you’re interested in building your own SaaS with almost the same stack as above, I also built a free SaaS template you can use that will save you days of work!

How I Marketed It

My biggest take-away from this whole project was that open-sourcing it was the best way to market it!

This seems counter-intuitive, right? Why would making the code available for anyone to see and copy be good for a business? You’re basically rolling out a red carpet for competitors, aren’t you?

Well, not quite.

First of all, the number of people who will realistically spend the time and energy launching a direct competitor is low. Also, most people interested in your open-source code want to learn some aspect of it and apply it to their own ideas, not just copy yours directly.

Secondly, and most importantly, the fact that it’s open-source makes people a lot more receptive to you talking about it.

reddit

When you present something you’ve built and give people the opportunity to learn from it, they’re much more welcoming! As a result, they’re more likely to upvote it, share it, use it, and recommend it to others.

This is exactly what happened with CoverLetterGPT! As a result of me sharing the open-source code, it get featured on the IndieHackers.com newsletter (>100k subscribers), shared on blogs, and talked about on social media platforms.

product hunt

And even though it’s a small, simple product, I tried launching it on Product Hunt, where it also performed considerably well.

So, all together, these initial efforts combined gave my product a good initial marketing presence. To this day, I haven’t really done much else to market it, except some twitter posts (and this post, if you want to consider it marketing 🤑).

How I Monetized It

When I first launched in March 2023, I didn’t really expect anyone to pay for the product, but I wanted to learn how to use Stripe as a payments processor, thinking that the skills might be useful in the future.

So I started simple, and just put a one-time payment link for tips. No paywall, no subscriptions. It was entirely free to use with any tip amount welcome.

To my surprise, tips started coming in, with some as high as $10 dollars!

This encouraged me to force users to login to use the product, and add a paywall after users used up 3 credits.

My initial payment options were:

  • $4.95 for a 3 months access
  • $2.95 for 10 cover letter generations
pricing page

That went reasonably well until I implemented the ability for users to use GPT to make finer edits to their generated cover letters. That’s when I changed my pricing and that’s when better profits started to come in:

  • $5.95 / month subscription with GPT-4
  • $2.95 / month subscription with GPT-3.5-turbo

Currently, over 90% of my customers choose the more powerful, more expensive plan with GPT-4, even though the 3 trial credits use the GPT-3.5-turbo model.

(I also integrated Bitcoin Lightning payments — check out the repo if you want to learn how — but haven’t received any yet.)

Now, with an MRR of ~$203, my monthly profit of course depends on my costs, which are:

  • Domain Name: $10/year
  • OpenAI bill: ~ $15/month
  • Hosting bill: ~ $3/month

Which leaves me at about ~ $183/month in profits 😀

Future Plans

One of the most surprising aspects about CoverLetterGPT.xyz’s success is that, on the surface, the product is very simple. Also, I’ve done very little in the way of SEO marketing, and haven’t continued to market it much at all. The current growth is mostly organic at this point thanks to my initial marketing efforts.

But I still have some plans to make it better:

  • buy a better top-level domain (TLD), like CoverLetterGPT.ai
  • add more features, like the ability to generate interview questions based on the cover letters
  • improve the UX and make it look more “professional”

If you have any other ideas how I could improve it, drop me a comment, message me on twitter/x, or submit a PR to the repo.

Final Words + More Resources

My intention with this article was to help others who might be considering launching their own SaaS product. So I hope that’s been the case here. If you still have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask.

Here are also the most important links from this article along with some further resources that will help in building and marketing your own profitable side-project:

Oh, and if you found these resources useful, don’t forget to support Wasp by starring the repo on GitHub!

star wasp

⭐️ Thanks For Your Support 🙏