Template EmpireNext.js SaaS boilerplate comparison — five contenders
If you are shipping a Next.js SaaS in the next 90 days, the realistic shortlist is short: Shipfast, Makerkit, Supastarter, PropelKit, or Template Empire Lite. This is the honest comparison.
Quick verdict
| Product | Commercial-use price | Lifetime updates | Multi-tenancy | Compliance scaffold |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Template Empire Lite | $199 | ✓ | Roadmap (Pro tier) | ✓ Structural (UK/EU/US scaffold) |
| Shipfast | $199 | ✓ | Not found in public materials reviewed | ◐ Baseline legal resources (Terms + Privacy) |
| Makerkit | From $299 (recheck) | ✓ | ✓ Account-based (client delivery needs Team licence) | ◐ Starter Terms / Privacy / Cookie pages documented |
| Supastarter | $349 one-time (reviewed) | ✓ | ✓ Organisations / multi-tenant | ◐ Starter Terms + Privacy |
| PropelKit | $69 launch offer (recheck) | One-time | ◐ RLS multi-tenant (claimed) | Claimed (unverified in materials reviewed) |
“Not found in public materials reviewed” means not found in the public materials reviewed on 28 May 2026; it does not prove the feature is absent from a vendor's private product downloads.
The honest read on each
Shipfast (Marc Lou) — $199 (recheck before purchase). The biggest brand in the indie space, advertised at $199 one-time with lifetime updates and broad commercial use including building end products for clients. It also markets documentation and tutorial content (bundle price date-sensitive) and an active community. A commonly discussed trade-off is that the codebase can grow cluttered after heavy customisation. I could not confirm public documentation for built-in multi-tenancy or a dedicated admin panel in the materials reviewed. Buy Shipfast if you are a first-time builder, want the bundled course, or value the community over published QA evidence.
Makerkit — from $299 (recheck before purchase). One of the most mature Supabase-native options in this set. It publicly documents a modern monorepo stack (Next.js / React / Tailwind / TypeScript / Turborepo — versions date-sensitive), account-based multi-tenancy, database-level Row Level Security, starter Terms / Privacy / Cookie pages buyers customise, and Stripe webhook signature verification in its default billing handler. Two licence points per their published terms: AI/ML training is prohibited, and client delivery requires a Team licence upgrade (the client also needs their own licence). Pricing is sale/tier dependent — a $299 sale framing on the homepage reviewed, with higher Pro and Teams tiers above that (recheck current tiers before purchase). Buy Makerkit if you are building multi-tenant B2B from day one and want the most mature plugin ecosystem.
Supastarter — $349 one-time (on the homepage reviewed). B2B-focused, advertised at $349 one-time on the public homepage reviewed with lifetime-access / no-subscription messaging. It documents organisations / multi-tenancy, app-wide i18n, and a broad scaffold (admin, billing, API, storage, webhook handling), and advertises multiple framework variants — Next.js and Nuxt confirmed, with its homepage and docs currently inconsistent about a third (TanStack Start vs SvelteKit). It advertises starter Terms and Privacy pages; I did not verify explicit RLS wording or exact webhook-signature wording in the public docs reviewed. Buy Supastarter if you are committed to Supabase, need internationalisation built-in, and do not need cinematic motion.
PropelKit — $69 launch offer (recheck before purchase). New entrant. Its public site currently centres on a $69 one-time launch offer (a struck-through higher Pro price is also shown); its older two-tier pricing is superseded. PropelKit publicly claims organisations, RBAC, and RLS-based multi-tenancy, plus built-in Stripe checkout, subscriptions, webhooks, PDF invoicing, and tax handling. Its update entitlement is inconsistent across its own materials (homepage cites 12 months, changelog cites lifetime), so recheck it. I could not find a public WCAG audit or per-release QA receipts in the materials reviewed. Buy PropelKit if you want a low-cost starting point and do not need published, per-release QA receipts.
Where Template Empire Lite wins — at $199
At $199, Template Empire Lite ships a broad structural compliance scaffold for this category. I could not find published equivalents for Shipfast in the materials reviewed. Makerkit ships starter legal pages, but I could not find a DSAR / data-export flow or audit_log in the materials reviewed. Supastarter ships starter privacy pages, but I could not find a DSAR / data-export flow or explicit RLS scoping in the materials reviewed. PropelKit's compliance claims are its own and unverified in the materials reviewed. This scaffold is product structure, not legal advice or a guarantee of compliance.
The Lite tier ships 68–81 features (count current as of review) including the TL00-BASE structural compliance scaffold:
- Data-export / DSAR flow — generates a downloadable copy of a user's data on request
- Account-deletion soft-delete with a restore window before hard purge
- audit_log Postgres table — seeded in the initial migration; records who did what and when
- Application-level row isolation (RLS-ready) — per-user query scoping in Lite; database-native RLS is a Pro-tier hardening
- Stripe webhook signature verification — stripe-signature header checked on all inbound webhook calls
- Password hashing, never plaintext — applies to any fallback credential flow
- Six legal page routes — /privacy, /terms, /cookie-policy, /accessibility, /dmca, /do-not-sell
- Cookie consent banner with Reject-All-at-parity + GPC honouring
Plus the engineering process scaffolding:
- 17-gate quality audit per release, with a multi-model LLM review panel per full-stack release (Claude specialists + Codex + Gemini)
- 358 pre-publish checks per release
- Buyer simulation test: clone → install → seed → login → run with zero manual edits
- Quality Gate Report PDF that ships with the download
The receipts
- /standards — full 17-gate pipeline, 8-phase release process, panel composition, buyer simulation
- /templates — Lite tier details with feature counts per family
- Each template product page links to its Quality Gate Report PDF
Side-by-side — the 10 attributes that decide
| Attribute | Template Empire Lite | Shipfast | Makerkit | Supastarter | PropelKit |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Commercial-use tier price (recheck before purchase) | $199 | $199 | from $299 | $349 | $69 launch |
| Updates window | Lifetime | Lifetime | Lifetime | Lifetime | Inconsistent — recheck |
| Stack currency (Next 16, Tw v4, strict TS) — recheck versions | ✓ | ◐ Differs per public materials reviewed | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Multi-framework | 14 stacks on roadmap · NJS today | Not found in public materials reviewed | Not found in public materials reviewed | ◐ Nuxt + others | Not found in public materials reviewed |
| Client work allowed at base tier | ✓ | ✓ | Team licence required (per their terms) | ✓ | ◐ |
| DSAR / data-export flow | ✓ | Not found in public materials reviewed | Not found in public materials reviewed | Not found in public materials reviewed | Not found in public materials reviewed |
| audit_log table | ✓ | Not found in public materials reviewed | Not found in public materials reviewed | Not found in public materials reviewed | Not found in public materials reviewed |
| RLS-ready row isolation | ✓ | Not found in public materials reviewed | ✓ Documented | ◐ Org-level isolation | ◐ Claimed |
| Stripe webhook signature verification | ✓ | Not found in public materials reviewed | ✓ Documented | Not found in public materials reviewed | ◐ Claimed |
| Per-release QA Report PDF | ✓ | Not found in public materials reviewed | Not found in public materials reviewed | Not found in public materials reviewed | Not found in public materials reviewed |
“Not found in public materials reviewed” means not found in the public materials reviewed on 28 May 2026; it does not prove the feature is absent from a vendor's private product downloads.
Buy them if…
- Buy Shipfast if you want the indie hacker community and the largest body of public reviews and YouTube tutorials.
- Buy Makerkit if you are shipping multi-tenant B2B from day one and you want the most mature plugin ecosystem.
- Buy Supastarter if you need i18n built in and a Nuxt variant matters to your team.
- Buy PropelKit if a low one-time price is your priority and you do not need published, per-release QA receipts.
- Buy Template Empire Lite if you are shipping anything that touches EU buyers (EAA / GDPR), US state-privacy regimes (CCPA and other state laws), or UK Companies Act requirements — and you want a broad structural compliance scaffold in the $199 boilerplate category. The scaffold is product structure, not legal advice or a guarantee of compliance; you remain responsible for policy wording, configuration, legal review, vendors, and data governance.
Comparison data last reviewed / verified as of 28 May 2026. Competitor pricing, licence terms, and features change frequently — recheck vendor pricing and licence terms before purchase. This page describes product scaffolding and is not legal advice or a guarantee of compliance.