Boilerplate opportunities
Have SaaS boilerplates peaked? Far from it...
Have SaaS boilerplates peaked? Far from it.
I’ve been collecting SaaS boilerplates on my SaaS Starters directory. Collected 100 so far. I’ve also been collecting boilerplates, themes and templates for directories for my Directory Starters directory.
Some interesting observations and opportunities:
NextJS saturation. The standard NextJS SaaS boilerplate scene is definitely over-crowded now. Marc Lou’s stellar success with ShipFast had ‘inspired’ too many copycats and wannabes, it seems. It’s pretty hard to get attention for boilerplates as it is, and doubly so in a crowded market. If you’re building a boilerplate, try to avoid yet another NextJS boilerplate, unless you got a niche spin on it…
Niche boilerplates. I’m starting to see more boilerplates tailored for specific niches, like AI apps, specific languages or frameworks (Nuxt, Laravel, Kotlin?!), mobile apps, even for serverless architecture. Those in Laravel and Swift seems to be doing well as a business. In fact, your differentiation doesn’t even need to be huge - it can be just a different third party integration, like say Paddle vs Stripe as people can have strong preferences for certain critical integrations like payment.
Some surprising niches: Boilerplates specifically for waitlists, AWS, .NET. Never knew there’s a market for .NET! Not common in indie maker circles for sure.
Very few boilerplates for ecommerce stores, Docker, Rails, Chrome extensions, nocode. So maybe start building these?
When it comes to boilerplate tech stack and integrations, I realised there’s a huge diversity in taste and preferences. Personal take: I use Nuxt, Bulma, Strapi, PostgreSQL, Heroku and after researching more than 100 boilerplates, I have yet to find any that’s a match with what I use!
So there’s still lots of space for everyone to build one based on your own stack, and there’s a chance there will be at least a small group who will share your taste (and you can earn some small side income from it).
What boilerplate would you build if time or effort was no issue?