Ship it and charge for it

The starter kits, and the payment rails to take money for whatever you build on top of them.

Two problems sit between an idea and a first paying customer, and both are boring. The first is the plumbing every product needs and nobody wants to write twice: authentication, a database layer, transactional email, a landing page. The second is taking money, which sounds solved until you discover that selling software across borders means sales tax in jurisdictions you have never visited. The starter kits here handle the first and the payment platforms handle the second. On payments the important distinction is the merchant of record: a processor leaves the tax obligation with you, while a merchant of record becomes the legal seller and takes it on for a higher percentage. For a solo developer selling internationally that difference usually matters more than the rate. On starter kits, what you are buying is a few weeks of setup and somebody else opinions about architecture, and the second half of that sentence is the part people underestimate.

Stripe

Payments, billing and invoicing with documentation people copy from.

FinancePaid

The default answer for taking payments and the deepest API of the four. It is not a merchant of record, though, so sales tax and VAT registration stay your problem in every country you sell into.

Wise

Send money across currencies at a rate you can check yourself.

FinancePaid

Not a payment processor, and here for the step everyone forgets. Getting money out of a processor and into a bank account in another currency is where a surprising share of the revenue quietly goes.

Paddle

Billing and tax compliance for software sold across borders.

FinancePaid

The same merchant-of-record model aimed at larger software businesses: more billing and compliance machinery, and correspondingly more onboarding before you are able to charge anyone anything.

Lemon Squeezy

A merchant of record, so sales tax stops being your problem.

FinancePaid

A merchant of record, which means it handles sales tax and VAT on your behalf. For one person selling software into thirty countries that is usually worth more than the difference in percentage.

Polar

Merchant-of-record billing for software, with tax and entitlements handled.

FinanceFreemium

Also a merchant of record, and the one built in the open — the billing itself is an open-source project you can read. Usage, credits and licence keys are first-class rather than bolted on, which is why it turns up around developer tools and AI products more than around conventional SaaS.

Dodo Payments

Merchant-of-record billing for AI products, with usage and credits built in.

FinancePaid

The newest merchant of record here, and the one built for products that charge for usage: metering, credit balances with rollover, and add-ons on a subscription are the primitives rather than extras. 4 percent plus 40 cents on a domestic US card, with no monthly fee, and surcharges stacking from there. Compare it with Polar and Paddle on the billing model you need rather than the headline rate.

create-t3-app

A typesafe Next.js stack scaffolded by answering four questions.

BoilerplatesOpen source

A scaffolding CLI rather than a product: pick the pieces and it wires TypeScript, tRPC, Prisma and NextAuth together so they agree with each other. Free, and the most neutral starting point here. It generates a codebase and then gets out of the way.

Makerkit

Multi-tenant SaaS boilerplate with teams and billing done properly.

BoilerplatesPaid

A paid starter kit carrying the parts most projects rewrite badly on the second attempt: teams, roles, invitations and billing. What you are buying is the fortnight you would otherwise spend discovering how multi-tenancy actually works.

ShipFast

A Next.js starter with auth, payments and email already wired together.

BoilerplatesPaid

Aimed squarely at getting something paid and live within days. Opinionated to the point of being narrow, which is the trade it offers, far less to decide, and correspondingly less room to deviate once you have started.

supastarter

SaaS scaffolding for Next.js, Nuxt or TanStack Start, with your own database.

BoilerplatesPaid

A starter built around Supabase, so the database, auth and storage questions are settled before you write anything. Sensible precisely when you already know that is the stack you want, and poor value when you do not.