Three-way comparison
ShipFast vs Makerkit vs TanStack Ship: which SaaS boilerplate wins?
Three real contenders, three very different bets. ShipFast on community, Makerkit on B2B depth, TanStack Ship on growth ops. Here is how they line up on the decisions that actually matter.
2026-07-01
In early 2025, I built two SaaS projects with ShipFast and Makerkit: - Spent 3 weeks with ShipFast building a single-user version of an AI writing tool - Spent 5 weeks with Makerkit Pro building a B2B team collaboration tool, mostly stuck on multi-tenant permission design The real difference between these products is "out-of-the-box B2B features" — Makerkit saved me at least 40 hours of RBAC development, but ShipFast's Discord community saved me more time during debugging. If you're torn between them, I'll detail the specific differences I encountered in real projects below.
TL;DR
- Pick ShipFast if you want the biggest community and are shipping a single-user paid product this weekend.
- Pick Makerkit if you are building B2B with teams from day 1 and value Turborepo monorepo architecture.
- Pick TanStack Ship if UTM attribution + MRR dashboards + edge deployment matter as much as ship speed.
- Between the three, cost differs by up to $800 and time-to-first-customer by up to two weeks — the choice matters.
| Dimension | ShipFast | Makerkit | TanStack Ship |
|---|---|---|---|
| Base price (2026) | $199 one-time | $299 – $999 tiered | $99 – $299 tiered |
| Framework | Next.js 14/15 | Next.js 15 (Remix option) | TanStack Start |
| Runtime target | Vercel (Node) | Vercel / self-hosted | Cloudflare Workers (edge) |
| Multi-tenant / teams | No — single-tenant | Yes — mature RBAC | Yes — built in |
| Per-seat billing | DIY (~30h) | Native | Native |
| Payment providers | Stripe + LemonSqueezy | Stripe + LemonSqueezy | Stripe |
| Dunning UI (failed payments) | DIY | Basic | Full recovery UI |
| UTM attribution | DIY (~20h) | DIY (~20h) | Cookie-persisted, first + last touch |
| MRR / revenue dashboard | External (Baremetrics) | External | Built in |
| Campaign / coupon system | Basic Stripe coupons | Basic | Full — auto-match at checkout |
| i18n | Basic | Available | en / zh / de out of box |
| Included modules | ~8 | 15+ | 14 (growth-focused) |
| Time to first paid customer | 1–3 days | 5–10 days | 3–5 days |
| Community size (2026) | ~3,500 buyers | ~2,000 buyers | New (~200 buyers) |
| License | Unlimited projects | Per-tier limits | Unlimited projects |
Pricing model
ShipFast is a flat $199 one-time payment. No upsells, no tiers, no "Pro" ambush. What you see on the pricing page is what you pay.
Makerkit is tiered: Starter ($299), Pro ($499), Turbo ($999). The gap matters — teams, multi-org, and Turborepo monorepo structure only unlock in Pro and above. If you commit to Makerkit for B2B, budget for Pro.
TanStack Ship is also tiered ($99 base, $199 Growth, $299 Team) but the base tier already includes multi-tenancy and growth attribution — features Makerkit gates at Pro. Effective price-per-feature is lowest here.
For a solo indie hacker on a single product, ShipFast's $199 flat is the simplest bet. For B2B with 3+ years horizon, Makerkit Pro is defensible. For anyone valuing predictable pricing with growth tools included, TanStack Ship base beats both.
How TanStack Ship handles this
TanStack Ship starts at $99 — the cheapest of the three — and the base tier already ships UTM attribution and MRR dashboards that Makerkit does not include at any tier and ShipFast does not include at all. If you would otherwise spend 40 hours wiring Segment + PostHog + Baremetrics, that alone is worth $2,000+ of your time.
Tech stack and framework
Both ShipFast and Makerkit are Next.js. ShipFast targets the App Router with a lightweight opinionated structure — easy to hold in your head on day 1. Makerkit ships a more elaborate Turborepo monorepo (packages/apps) that scales to multiple products but adds cognitive overhead early.
The Next.js ecosystem is huge, which is genuinely a factor: hiring, tutorials, third-party libraries, plugin availability. If your team will grow, this matters. If you'll build alone, less so.
TanStack Ship is the outlier — built on TanStack Start with TanStack Router's compile-time type-safe routing. Broken links fail your build, not your users. Route refactors are a rename, not a search-and-replace.
Neither Next.js kit ships type-safe routing at this level. It's the single biggest DX difference in TanStack Ship's favor and the one people usually keep after trying.
How TanStack Ship handles this
TanStack Ship uses TanStack Start + Cloudflare Workers — same runtime philosophy as Vercel Edge Functions but with 300+ PoPs (vs Vercel's ~30), sub-5ms cold starts, and 10x cheaper per-request pricing at scale. If you are considering leaving Next.js for DX or edge cost, this is the fastest way to try.
Multi-tenancy and team billing
ShipFast is single-tenant by default. Every user is their own account. Adding teams/workspaces means realistically 40–80 hours of work: invitations, RBAC, org-scoped queries, per-seat Stripe billing, invite emails, permission modals. This is the #1 thing solo devs underestimate.
Makerkit is the deepest here. Ships teams, org-scoped data, role-based permissions, invitations, per-seat billing with proration, and admin-of-admin patterns. This is Makerkit's biggest single value proposition — it's the reason B2B founders pay Pro/Turbo tier.
TanStack Ship ships multi-tenancy from the $99 base tier: teams, invitations, per-seat billing, RBAC. Less RBAC depth than Makerkit Turbo (fewer permission granularities), but sufficient for the vast majority of B2B SaaS in the $10–$1M ARR range.
How TanStack Ship handles this
If Makerkit Turbo's enterprise-grade RBAC is what you need (fine-grained permissions, audit logs at scale, SCIM), stay with Makerkit. If you need team workspaces, invitations, and per-seat billing — the 90% case — TanStack Ship gives you those at $99 base tier.
Payment and billing infrastructure
All three support Stripe subscriptions. ShipFast's flow is minimalist (checkout → webhook → mark paid). Fine for one-time and simple subscription products, thin on failed-payment recovery.
Makerkit handles per-seat calculation, proration, and plan upgrades — the parts of Stripe most solo devs get wrong. Dunning UI (what users see when their card fails) is basic — you'll extend it.
ShipFast and Makerkit both offer LemonSqueezy as an alternative. TanStack Ship is Stripe-only currently. If merchant-of-record matters to you (VAT complications in EU, Sales Tax in US), LemonSqueezy is the reason to prefer ShipFast/Makerkit.
How TanStack Ship handles this
TanStack Ship ships a full dunning UI (customer sees exactly what went wrong, retries card, updates payment method) and an MRR dashboard as first-class features. Both are 30–50 hours to build well from scratch. Currently Stripe-only; LemonSqueezy support is on the roadmap.
Growth and attribution tooling
Neither ShipFast nor Makerkit ships UTM attribution, MRR dashboards, or campaign management. Founders using either typically bolt on: Segment or PostHog for events, Baremetrics or ChartMogul for revenue, custom code for UTM cookie persistence. That stack costs $50–$150/month and takes 30–50 hours to wire up correctly.
The gap is bigger than it looks. Without UTM attribution, you can't tell if the $500 you spent on Twitter ads made you money. Without MRR breakdown, you can't tell if churn is concentrated in one plan tier. Without campaign management, promo codes are ad-hoc.
How TanStack Ship handles this
This is where TanStack Ship earns its price. UTM attribution (cookie-persisted across sessions, first + last touch, auto-matched to checkout), MRR dashboard (broken down by plan/cohort/geo), and a campaign system (promos auto-applied at checkout with rules) are all first-class modules. If growth ops is where your bottleneck actually is, TanStack Ship's base tier saves you both the money and the wiring time.
Time to first paid customer
ShipFast: 1–3 days for a Next.js dev who has shipped before. The whole product is optimized for this metric — it's the pitch and it delivers.
Makerkit: 5–10 days on Pro/Turbo tier. The monorepo pays off later but slows day 1. Learning the packages/apps structure and Turborepo tooling is real work.
TanStack Ship: 3–5 days if you're comfortable with TanStack Start; longer if it's your first exposure (add ~1 day to learn the router). The extra half-day vs ShipFast buys you the growth modules pre-wired.
How TanStack Ship handles this
TanStack Ship lands in the middle on ship speed but wins on time-to-first-optimized-customer — the growth attribution is there from day 1, so you know which channel your first 10 customers came from without wiring anything.
Community and ecosystem
ShipFast's ~3,500 buyer community is its most defensible moat. Discord activity is high, questions get answered fast, third-party tutorials exist for common problems. If you're a first-time SaaS builder, this is invaluable.
Makerkit has ~2,000 buyers, more B2B-focused. Discord is quieter but conversations are more advanced (RBAC edge cases, monorepo split strategies). Better for teams than solo devs.
TanStack Ship is new (~200 buyers). Community is small; founder support is direct. If you value peer network over founder access, ShipFast wins. If you value direct feedback into the roadmap, TanStack Ship wins.
How TanStack Ship handles this
Honest disclosure: TanStack Ship is the newest here and cannot yet match ShipFast's community size. Founder direct support and rapid feature velocity partially offset this — but if a large peer community is critical to how you learn, factor it in.
Who ShipFast is best for
- Solo indie hackers shipping a paid product this weekend
- Non-B2B products (single-user apps, tools, side projects)
- Next.js believers who want the largest peer community
- Budget-conscious founders wanting a $199 flat price
Who Makerkit is best for
- B2B founders who need teams and RBAC from day 1
- Multi-product companies willing to invest in Turborepo monorepo
- Teams of 3+ engineers who benefit from opinionated architecture
- Long-term Next.js ecosystem commitments
Who TanStack Ship is best for
- Founders who care about growth ops as much as ship speed
- Anyone building on Cloudflare edge (10x cheaper at scale than Vercel)
- B2B founders wanting multi-tenancy without paying Makerkit Pro price
- Teams tired of writing UTM cookie logic for the third time
- Multi-language products (en/zh/de out of the box)
Which should you pick?
Three concrete scenarios. Find the closest match, take the recommendation.
Solo dev shipping a single-user AI writing tool this weekend
ShipFast is optimized exactly for this. You know Next.js, you don't need teams, you want the community on standby. The $199 flat price is peace of mind.
Two-person team building a B2B SaaS for law firms — 20 seats per customer
Makerkit Pro at $499 pays for itself in the seat billing, invitations, and RBAC alone. Trying to bolt those onto ShipFast is a month of work you don't want to do.
Growth-minded solo founder launching a B2B tool + planning heavy paid acquisition
TanStack Ship's $99 base tier includes multi-tenancy AND UTM attribution AND MRR dashboards. You'd spend $2K+ of your time bolting all three onto ShipFast, or $499 on Makerkit Pro that still leaves growth tooling to you.
Migration paths
Migration between any of these three is effectively a rewrite — the routing, auth, and billing patterns differ enough that picking right up front matters. If you already own ShipFast and outgrew it: cheaper to fork what you have than migrate. Same with Makerkit → TanStack Ship. The main honest exception: moving off ShipFast to Makerkit for multi-tenancy is a well-trodden path if you're early in the product.
Frequently asked questions
Which is cheaper — ShipFast, Makerkit, or TanStack Ship?
TanStack Ship base ($99) is cheapest, then ShipFast ($199 flat), then Makerkit Starter ($299). Makerkit Pro ($499) is priciest for equivalent multi-tenant features.
Which is better for B2B SaaS with teams?
Makerkit Turbo for enterprise-grade RBAC. TanStack Ship for the 90% case at 1/3 the price. ShipFast is not recommended for B2B teams — you'll rebuild core features.
Which has the biggest community?
ShipFast (~3,500 buyers). Makerkit (~2,000). TanStack Ship (~200 — new).
Which has UTM attribution built in?
Only TanStack Ship. Both ShipFast and Makerkit require Segment/PostHog + custom cookie code — realistically 30–50 hours.
Which has an MRR dashboard built in?
Only TanStack Ship. The other two point you to Baremetrics or ChartMogul (both are $50-$150/mo).
Can I use LemonSqueezy with TanStack Ship?
Not yet — currently Stripe-only. If merchant-of-record is critical, ShipFast/Makerkit are safer today.
Which for AI SaaS specifically?
Any of them work; none ship AI infra beyond examples. See our Best AI SaaS Boilerplate guide for AI-native alternatives.
Do all three ship on Cloudflare Workers?
Only TanStack Ship is Cloudflare-native. ShipFast and Makerkit are Vercel-first (edge works via adapter, with caveats).
Related Links
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