Announcing MakerKit - A SaaS starter for Next.js and Firebase

Announcing MakerKit - A boilerplate for building a SaaS with Next.js, Firebase, and Tailwind CSS.

Why

Now and then, a new idea pops into my head.

Sometimes it's a SaaS, a publication, a plugin, or just a micro-website. It's exciting ideas that make their way into my brain - and occupy my thoughts until I either get it done or abandon the idea altogether.

More often than not, these ideas are just poor, so I resign myself never to start building them. Sometimes, instead, it's the daunting task of setting up all the foundations needed to launch a minimal MVP.

Authentication? Check. Getting paid? Check.

Yes, yes, Firebase and Stripe make it easy enough. But it's not magic. You will need to write the glue to hold stuff together. Which, believe it or not, takes more time than it should.

My dream is to focus solely on the value proposition of whatever I'm building: I need a boilerplate which I can spin up in a couple of hours, or, ideally, a couple of minutes.

That's why I'm building MakerKit. It's for you and me, indie-hackers and solopreneurs. It's for making quick, but also well.

The Technology Stack: Next.js and Firebase

I'm betting on two of the hottest technologies around: Next.js (on Vercel) and Firebase.

• Next.js is very simply a joy to work with: it's fast, fun, has a vast ecosystem, and keeps improving in every release.
• Firebase is one of the best indie hackers tools available: it's relatively cheap and easy to get started with; furthermore, by now, I know it inside-out.

I want to keep it open to more boilerplates: for example, I'd like to support Supabase, Vue, Angular, Ionic, and others.

But these tools are my current choice for a project of any kind, so it makes sense to get started with them first.

Features

MakerKit will be a unified, SSR-rendered website. Marketing and App will use the same codebase, and the authentication will be persisted in all the pages.

In 2022, this is what a modern website should look like.

MakerKit will provide, out-of-the-box, the following features:

• Landing Page
• Blog
• Docs
• Pricing Page
• Full Authentication / Session flow
  • Social Logins
  • Password Reset
• Profile Page
• Onboarding Flow
• Team Management
• Subscription/Payments Management
  • Initially with Stripe
  • Web3 options in the future
• Emailing
• UI Components built with Tailwind and Headless UI
• A beautiful Tailwind theme, with dark-mode
• Mobile ready

The hardest part when building a boilerplate is to provide a lot of stuff that works; simultaneously, you want the existing code easy to modify or delete.

Everyone will have different needs, ideas, visions: a boilerplate cannot do that for you. But it needs to make it damn easy to let you change the whole UI if you want to, or swap the default components with your favorite UI library, etc.

Those are why I will release MakerKit as a private Github repository rather than a collection of libraries.

Users need the ability to modify the codebase as they wish; yet retain all the advantages of having a boilerplate in the first place.

Interested? Please take a look at MakerKit. I'm planning on releasing it in early Q1 2022 - but you can subscribe to receive updates about how I'm building the product.

Thanks for reading, ciao!