Boilerplate or Bloatplate?

By Andrew on 8/6/2024

Why build yet another starter kit?

Opensource Boilerplates - The Problem

Open source has an incredible advantage when it comes to building software. With boilerplates, however, the advantage of hundreds of people contributing features has the opposite effect.

As a startup founder, you scroll through the list of features thinking about the dozens of dependencies that haven’t been updated in years, the hundreds of configuration points you need before launching, and all the things you’re going to need to delete just to start.

Worst of all, the devops takeover: CI/CD, kubernetes, terraform, QA servers, nothing gets you to quit your idea faster than a $300/month infrastructure bill.

Paid systems are often not better, many of them feel the need to build a massive amount of features to justify the hefty $500-$1000 price tag. These features are often just slapped in to build value.

Every startup needs…

Even with all of these features, it seems that boilerplates forget what an actual startup needs:

1. A beautiful static landing page that’s incredibly fast (performance index should be above a 90), frictionless to sign up or purchase, and most importantly SEO-friendly. We solve this by providing a completely separate static site built in Astro and a markdown blog for pushing out content quickly.

2. It shouldn’t cost $300/month to deploy. We host nearly all of our sites on a $10/mo VPS to start and scale from there after we verify product-market fit and charge a one-time fee for lifetime usage (no project specific restrictions).

3. Sure, it needs to have authentication, stripe payments, etc… however, these features should have to have thought out user experiences (not just slapped together APIs/webhooks). For example, checkout should be frictionless, it should be clear what the next step is after signing up, the theming should be consistent, etc… The challenge isn’t making an API call and calling it an integration, it’s about the user’s experience with the integration.

If you decide to give slimsaas.com a shot, please reach out! Would love to connect and hear what you are building.