Next.js starter kits for indie hackers

What this is

CheapStack sells Next.js 16 starter kits between $19 and $59, one-time, with no subscription. For an indie hacker the relevant question is not "does it have auth" — everything has auth — but whether the hours it saves are hours you would actually have spent, and whether buying it once covers every project you start this year.

The answer to the second one is yes: the licence permits unlimited personal and commercial projects. One purchase, every side project.

The honest version of the time saving

A starter kit does not save you a month. Anyone claiming that is counting hours you were never going to spend.

What it removes is a specific, bounded set of work:

• Wiring an auth adapter so sessions actually persist, rather than silently falling back to JWTs
• Verifying webhook signatures, and making the handler idempotent so a replayed event does not double-apply
• A schema that already has the join table and the unique index you will otherwise add in week three
• Deciding which of the four plausible ways to do each of the above is the one that will not bite you

That is a weekend of work if it goes well. It goes well less often than you would like, because each piece is individually easy and collectively full of small traps — the kind where everything looks fine until a customer pays and nothing happens.

If your side project dies, it will not be because you spent Saturday on auth. But Saturday is still Saturday.

When not to buy one

Be honest about which of these you are:

• You are learning. Reading someone else's wiring teaches you less than doing it once yourself. Buy later, build now.
• Your idea needs none of this. A single-page tool with no accounts does not need a SaaS boilerplate. The Landing Page Kit at $19 is the whole of what you need.
• You have not validated anything. A kit makes building faster. It does not make anyone want the thing.

What you actually get

The SaaS Boilerplate is the one worth your money at $59: sign-in that works across four providers, Stripe and Polar webhooks that verify signatures and write to the database, organizations with roles and seat limits, and 13 Playwright tests that pass on a fresh clone so you can tell immediately if you broke something.

The smaller kits are scaffolds and described as such. Read the "what's inside" list on each product page before buying — it lists files, not adjectives.

The money

If you ship two side projects a year for three years, the bundle costs about four dollars a project.

Where to go next

• Build a SaaS for $100/month — the running costs after the kit
• ShipFast vs CheapStack — the honest comparison, including where ShipFast wins
• Best Next.js boilerplate 2026 — including options that are not ours

Questions