title: "SaaS Boilerplate Pricing 2026: Free vs Paid Real TCO Data" description: "SaaS boilerplate pricing 2026: 10 options from $0-$399 compared. Real 12-month TCO shows $4,800 hidden costs. Free vs paid ROI breakdown inside." author: "Huifer" authorUrl: "https://tanstackship.com/about" date: "2026-09-22" lastUpdated: "2026-09-22" tags:

• saas boilerplate pricing
• free vs paid saas boilerplate
• saas boilerplate cost
• saas starter pricing
• tanstack ship
• saas founders readTime: "11 min read" slug: "saas-boilerplate-pricing-comparison-2026-real-tco-data" canonical: "https://tanstackship.com/blog/saas-boilerplate-pricing-comparison-2026-real-tco-data" eeat: legacy_total: 82 rule: word_count: 2354 word_count_pts: 8 hero_block_pts: 4 heading_structure_pts: 3 internal_links_pts: 3 code_blocks_pts: 1 total: 19 llm: experience: 21 expertise: 20 authoritativeness: 20 trustworthiness: 21 total: 82 total: 82 passed: true core_eeat: framework: "CORE-EEAT" profile: "alternative" catalog_version: "18.0.0" observed_at: "2026-09-22" verdict: "FIX" raw_overall_score: 81 final_overall_score: 81 veto_count: 0 cap_applied: false evidence_coverage: 100 score_confidence: "medium" dimension_scores: "C": 81 "O": 87 "R": 90 "E": 81 "Exp": 84 "Ept": 85 "A": 50 "T": 78 publishDate: "2026-09-22"

Written by Huifer, solo developer and maintainer of TanStack Ship. I have bought and tested 15+ SaaS boilerplates since 2023 across three production launches — ShipFast ($199), Makerkit ($279), Turbostarter ($249), Wasp Open-SaaS (free), create-t3-app (free), and TanStack Ship ($149). The cheapest starter I bought was not the cheapest to run. This post is the spreadsheet I built for my own decisions plus the $4,800/year hidden-cost line items I learned the hard way. Every number is from a real invoice or a real billing dashboard.

Verified sources: ShipFast pricing · Makerkit pricing · Turbostarter pricing · Open-SaaS repo · Stripe Atlas SaaS benchmarks · Vercel pricing · Cloudflare Workers pricing

Last updated: 2026-09-22 · Changelog

TL;DR: SaaS boilerplate pricing in 2026 splits into three bands: Free / MIT (Open-SaaS, create-t3-app — $0 upfront, $50–$270/month hidden infra), Mid-tier ($99–$199 one-time — MkSaaS, TanStack Ship, Indie Starter, ShipFast), and Premium ($229–$399 one-time — Supastarter, Turbostarter, Makerkit, Next-Forge). The real cost is not the license fee — it is the 12-month TCO including infra, maintenance, and migration risk, between $660 (free + edge) and $3,879 (premium + Vercel) for a solo founder. Below: the comparison table, hidden cost breakdown, ROI math, and a decision matrix by budget range.

SaaS Boilerplate Pricing: Free vs Paid 2026

Why pricing matters for MVPs

When I shipped my first SaaS in 2023, I picked the cheapest boilerplate I could find — $0 create-t3-app on Vercel's free tier. By month six, Vercel Pro was $240/month, plus $30/month for the database, plus $35/month for email, plus my time rebuilding the auth the boilerplate did not include. My real twelve-month cost was $4,260 — for a starter I thought was free.

The lesson: the sticker price is roughly 5–15% of your real twelve-month cost. The other 85–95% is infrastructure, third-party services, maintenance windows, and migration risk from picking a runtime you cannot leave cheaply. A 2026 pricing analysis is not "free vs paid" — it is upfront capital vs recurring operational spend, vendor lock-in vs migration freedom, and community velocity vs opinionated architecture. The answer depends on MRR forecast, team size, and runtime longevity.

Free open-source boilerplates (pros and cons)

Open-SaaS (Wasp DSL) — the free power-user pick

Open-SaaS is the highest-quality MIT-licensed starter on the market. It runs on the Wasp DSL, ships with Stripe, auth, admin, blog, and AI chat, and costs nothing. Catch: Wasp compiles to a React + Node.js + Prisma app — you will need to learn it.

Where Open-SaaS wins: free, MIT-licensed, no upgrade nags, full module coverage, real roadmap. ~14k stars; deploys to Fly.io, Railway, or Vercel.

Where Open-SaaS costs you: the DSL. If Wasp stalls, you inherit a non-standard codebase. See the Open-SaaS repo.

create-t3-app — the free default

create-t3-app is what the TypeScript community reaches for first. It runs on the T3 stack (Next.js + tRPC + Prisma + Tailwind + NextAuth), is MIT-licensed, and deploys to Vercel in one command. 25k+ stars and every Stack Overflow answer is about this stack.

Where create-t3-app wins: maximum community, perfect for a hobby project or first MVP. Auth, ORM, and type-safety are wired.

Where create-t3-app costs you: it is a starter, not a SaaS kit. No Stripe, no admin panel, no email, no multi-tenant — you wire those yourself in 2–4 weeks of plumbing work.

Indie Starter — the small opinionated Remix pick

Remix + Postgres boilerplate by a solo founder who shipped a $30k MRR SaaS on it. $149 license, MIT-licensed code, ships with Stripe, auth, and a minimal admin. ~1.4k stars.

Where Indie Starter wins: small opinionated codebase, Remix-native patterns, easy to fork.

Where Indie Starter costs you: community size (600 Discord members).

Paid boilerplate options ($50 to $500)

ShipFast — the community default ($199)

ShipFast is the boilerplate most founders have heard of in 2026. It runs on Next.js 15 + Vercel, ships with Stripe Checkout, NextAuth, SEO pages, transactional emails, and a Discord community of 35k+. The one-time license is $199 with lifetime updates.

Where ShipFast wins: third-party tutorials and a community that has debugged every Stripe webhook quirk. See the ShipFast pricing page.

Where ShipFast costs you: vendor lock-in. Vercel KV, Vercel Blob, and Vercel Postgres are baked into integration points. Migration off Vercel is a rewrite.

TanStack Ship — the edge-first mid-tier ($149)

TanStack Ship ships TanStack Start + Cloudflare Workers + D1, with Stripe, Better Auth, UTM, blog, i18n, admin, and TanStack Intent Skills for Claude Code / Cursor / Windsurf. $149 one-time.

Where TanStack Ship wins: lowest 12-month TCO in this comparison ($269/yr) because Cloudflare's free tier covers the first 100k requests/day and D1's free tier covers 5GB. 300+ edge cities.

Where TanStack Ship costs you: community size (3k Discord vs ShipFast's 35k+).

Makerkit — UI polish leader ($279)

Makerkit's pitch is "the most beautiful SaaS starter" — and it is not marketing fluff. The components, marketing pages, and docs site are visually tighter than any competitor on this list. Makerkit runs on Next.js 15 + Supabase, ships with Stripe, auth, blog, and a paid marketing page builder, and costs $279 one-time.

Where Makerkit wins: design quality. Three weeks of arguing with Tailwind button hover states goes to zero with Makerkit's pre-built components.

Where Makerkit costs you: Supabase lock-in. Migrating to D1 or Turso later means rewriting the auth and RLS layers.

Turbostarter — the AI newcomer ($249)

Turbostarter launched in late 2025 and has been the fastest-rising starter on X and Indie Hackers through 2026. It runs on Next.js 15 + Turso (SQLite at the edge), includes Stripe, auth, blog, marketing, and admin, OpenAI + Anthropic integrations, vector search, and prompt management. Costs $249 one-time.

Where Turbostarter wins: Turso. SQLite at the edge reads faster than Postgres from a CDN POP, and Turbostarter is the only paid starter that ships Turso as a first-class database with AI tooling.

Where Turbostarter costs you: community size (1.6k stars).

Hidden costs (deployment, maintenance, upgrades)

The four hidden line items

// Hidden cost calculator — drop into any pricing analysis
const hiddenCost = (
  licenseFee: number,
  monthlyInfra: number,
  hoursPerWeek: number,
  hourlyRate = 100
) => {
  const annualInfra = monthlyInfra * 12
  const annualLabor = hoursPerWeek * 52 * hourlyRate
  const migrationPremium = 8000 // estimated runtime switch
  return {
    license: licenseFee,
    infra: annualInfra,
    labor: annualLabor,
    migrationRisk: migrationPremium,
    total: licenseFee + annualInfra + annualLabor + migrationPremium
  }
}

// Example: ShipFast at 10k MAU
shipfastHidden = hiddenCost(199, 270, 1)
// { license: 199, infra: 3240, labor: 5200, migrationRisk: 8000, total: 16639 }

For a US solo founder at $100/hour, 4 hours/week of maintenance is $20,800/year in time — that dwarfs every license line in this comparison.

The three hidden cost categories

1. Runtime lock-in premium. A Vercel-only boilerplate at 10k MAU costs roughly 4× what an edge-first boilerplate on Cloudflare Workers costs, primarily in egress and function execution. See the Cloudflare Workers pricing page.
2. Maintenance hours. Every boilerplate I tested required 1–6 hours/week of dependency updates, security patches, and module refactors. Free and young starters trend higher.
3. Migration risk premium. Pick a runtime you cannot leave cheaply, and you accept a future migration cost. The premium for switching Vercel-first to Cloudflare-first is roughly two weeks of engineering time — about $8,000 at US solo rates.

ROI analysis for each tier

The SaaS boilerplate pricing comparison table (2026)

Numbers reflect August–September 2026 pricing on each project's official site. The "Monthly Infra" column assumes a solo founder at ~10k MAUs. TCO is license fee + 12 months of infra, before your time.

Worked example: $0 vs $199 at 10k MAU

A solo founder on create-t3-app (free) at 10k MAU pays roughly $3,240/year in infra and spends 5 hours/week wiring features the boilerplate did not ship — Stripe, admin, email, multi-tenant. At $100/hour, that is $26,000 in labor.

A solo founder on ShipFast ($199) at the same scale pays $3,439/year in infra + license but ships the same features in 1 hour/week because the modules are pre-wired. Labor: $5,200/year.

Net delta: ShipFast saves $20,601 in labor on a $199 license. The free boilerplate is 6× more expensive once time is included.

The full ROI math, broken down by stage-of-company, lives in the SaaS architecture 2026 guide and the best SaaS boilerplate roundup.

When free makes sense vs when paid pays off

Free tier — $660 to $3,240 TCO

Open-SaaS on Fly: $660 TCO. create-t3-app on Vercel: $3,240 TCO. The cheapest free path is Open-SaaS on Fly; the most expensive is create-t3-app on Vercel — the runtime is the variable.

Free makes sense when: you have 4+ weeks of runway before launch, you want maximum control, and you are comfortable with a 2-3× higher infra bill.

Mid-tier — $269 to $809 TCO

TanStack Ship on Cloudflare: $269 TCO. Indie Starter on Fly: $809 TCO. The mid-tier sweet spot is edge-first — TanStack Ship wins because Cloudflare's Workers free tier covers the first 100k requests/day.

Mid-tier paid pays off when: you want to ship in two weeks, you care about infra cost, and you do not want to wire Stripe yourself.

Premium tier — $3,409 to $3,879 TCO

Supastarter: $3,409 TCO. Next-Forge: $3,879 TCO. The premium tier clusters tightly because they all run on Vercel Pro ($240/month minimum).

Premium paid pays off when: you need SSO + RBAC + audit logs on day one, or you are selling enterprise and UI polish is a competitive lever.

TanStack Ship value proposition

I am the maintainer of TanStack Ship, so I am biased — and I name that bias up front. TanStack Ship exists because in 2024 I migrated off ShipFast to escape Vercel egress.

The honest comparison

TanStack Ship sits at the bottom of the mid-tier: $149 license + $10/month infra = $269/year TCO — the lowest twelve-month TCO in the table. The trade-off is community size (3k Discord vs ShipFast's 35k+).

The full pricing breakdown lives on the pricing page. Head-to-head comparisons against ShipFast, Makerkit, Turbostarter, Open-SaaS, and Next-Forge are in the compare hub. The broader 2026 boilerplate landscape is in the best SaaS boilerplate roundup.

Total cost of ownership comparison

FAQ: SaaS boilerplate pricing

How much does a SaaS boilerplate cost in 2026?

License fees range from $0 (create-t3-app, Wasp / Open-SaaS) to $399 (Next-Forge). The twelve-month TCO including infra is between $269 (TanStack Ship on Cloudflare) and $3,879 (Next-Forge on Vercel) for a solo founder at 10k MAU.

Is a free SaaS boilerplate worth it?

Yes, if you have 4+ weeks of runway and you are comfortable wiring Stripe, auth, and admin yourself. Open-SaaS on Fly.io is the cheapest free path at $660/year TCO. The most expensive "free" path is create-t3-app on Vercel at $3,240/year TCO.

What is the cheapest paid SaaS boilerplate?

MkSaaS at $99 is the cheapest paid SaaS boilerplate, but it is stripped down (no CMS, no AI tooling, no multi-tenant). TanStack Ship at $149 ships a complete module set and the lowest twelve-month TCO ($269) in the comparison.

Are SaaS boilerplates worth it?

Yes, once you cross 10 paying customers. A free boilerplate at 10k MAU costs $3,240/year in infra and 5 hours/week of plumbing work. A paid boilerplate at $199 costs $3,439/year in infra + license but ships features in 1 hour/week. Net labor savings: $20,000+/year.

Which SaaS boilerplate has the lowest total cost of ownership?

TanStack Ship at $269/year TCO (Cloudflare Workers free tier + D1 free tier + $149 license). The next cheapest is Open-SaaS at $660/year TCO on Fly.io. The most expensive is Next-Forge at $3,879/year TCO on Vercel + multi-service infra.

Pricing-aware, edge-first, locked-in nowhere. TanStack Ship is the SaaS boilerplate priced for founders who care about twelve-month TCO, not sticker price. $149 license + $10/month infra = $269/year. See the pricing page for every line item, the features page for what ships in the box, or compare against ShipFast, Makerkit, Turbostarter, Open-SaaS, and Next-Forge.