What are Boilerplates?

Boilerplate originally referred to the rolled steel used to make boilers for steam engines in the 19th century.

Over time, the term evolved to describe any standardized piece of text or code that can be reused without significant changes.

Interest in SaaS has been on the rise, and many more people now want to build products. However, building products from scratch takes a lot of time, and it can be extremely frustrating.

Enter SaaS Boilerplates

With the standardization of stacks and basic systems that govern SaaS tools, it has become evident that there was a need, and the time was ripe for SaaS Boilerplates.

SaaS Boilerplates come with landing pages, website components, authentication modules, payment modules, and various other standard features that can save developers a significant amount of time and cost.

The market is flooded with Boilerplates for various tech stacks, such as NextJS, Laravel, Swift, NuxtJS, and so forth.

Pros and Cons of Boilerplates

Pros

• Save a significant amount of time and money
• Reduce frustration for developers as the redundant tasks are taken care of
• Boilerplates often follow best practices
• For anywhere between $49 and $299, they provide terrific value for those looking to build something very quickly

Most importantly, Boilerplates also enable aspiring founders and builders with limited technical resources or abilities to ship their products faster and more cheaply.

They are beacons of hope for non-technical founders looking to build a product quickly.

Cons

• Limited flexibility
• May become outdated fairly quickly
• Setting them up still requires time
• Similar landing pages and design themes can make the product look like a clone

Marc Lou’s Shipfast

For most of us, Marc Lou popularized the idea of SaaS Boilerplate.

Marc Lou launched Shipfast in August 2023. He had built 27 projects prior to this and Shipfast was nothing but all his basic code organised properly.

At that time, there were no solid NextJS boilerplates, and Shipfast just took off. He got traction via Product Hunt, Twitter and Hacker News and soon Shipfast went viral.

Shipfast now generates $130K/mo, just 9 months after its launch.

Marc has been building Shipfast in public, which has led to a lot of interest in SaaS Boilerplates. The market is now flooded with boilerplates for every major tech stack.

Marc reaped the benefits of the first mover’s advantage as well as the social proof via his Shipfast community.

I don’t think any other boilerplates are as successful as Shipfast, but there are quite a few good ones out there.

• Shipixen has grossed over $20K in the 5 months
• Makerkit does ~$3500/mo

Moreover, there are many open-source boilerplates available for popular stacks such as NextJS.

The Evolution of Boilerplates

Boilerplates are quickly turning into no-code/low-code code generation tools.

For instance, Shipixen allows you to generate custom code for landing pages, waitlist pages and blogs using a simple User Interface.

Boilerplates are perfectly posied to sit between code and no-code. Allow the flexibility of code with the interface of a no-code tool — that will be the core value proposition of SaaS boilerplates.

Should you build a Boilerplate?

Well, the market is flooded, but I believe there’s still an opportunity to leverage boilerplates.

• You can build boilerplates for certain types of apps or tools, such as Chrome extensions
• Boilerplates can act as a great lead funnel for building out a great productized services business
• No-code/low-code code generation boilerplates can become a big thing if you can help build complex tools
• Niche tech stack boilerplates may still be lucrative

Known strategies for successfully building a boilerplate 👇🏻

• Shipfast thrives because of social proof and community
• SaaSRock generates most of its traffic from its Gumroad listings and blogs
• Usenextbase and Shipixen are being built in public
• Many boilerplates start with waitlists
• They have a very clear value proposition around saving time and cost

Design & No-Code Boilerplates

Here is the corrected version with improved grammar and clarity:

While SaaS (code) boilerplates have become fairly popular, other types of boilerplates are emerging in the market, such as design boilerplates and no-code boilerplates.

To be honest, design boilerplates have been around for a while. You will find numerous landing page packs, component libraries, and so forth.

Makers are now building kits that leverage standard libraries and technologies such as Tailwind CSS, Daisy UI, and more.

Nick Buzz from the famous baked.design has this 50 Landing Page Design Kit in Tailwind CSS & Figma which is wildly popular.

Lastly, there is a trend of no-code boilerplates as well. Mohit is building a Bubble Boilerplate for the popular no-code platform — Bubble.

All in all, I think that people want to build products and build them fast. Boilerplates help them save a significant amount of time and cost. More importantly, boilerplates are impulse purchases for people who have not shipped but who want to ship.

---

Introducing BuilderKit.ai

We have been building AI SaaS tools for quite a while now. 10+ products across text, image, speech, RAG — we have built em all.

We figured that it seems easy but actually building these so called AI Wrappers can be time consuming and frustrating — there is a lot of nuance to it.

So we built BuidlerKit.ai — a NextJS SaaS Boilerpalte

It takes care of everything from landing pages, authentication, dashboarding, emails, SEO to payments — everything that you need to build your tool.

It also comes with 8+ production-ready apps.

Moreover, the BuilderKit community is an exclusive community of AI SaaS builders (Pro Only Access)

The Pre Orders are now live at https://www.builderkit.ai

(First 100 Customers get $100 Off — I think we have already done ~20 odd orders since the announcement yesterday, Grab your seat asap!)

Starter Plan $49, Pro Plan @ $99