A one-time-payment SaaS boilerplate (£49, yours for good)
Pay once, own the full source forever. And because the stack self-hosts whole on one cheap VPS, there is no queue of runtime subscriptions waiting behind the purchase either.
The sticker price is only half the bill. Most paid boilerplates are one-time purchases too — where they get expensive is the stack they assume around them: a Vercel plan, a managed Postgres, a Clerk seat, a Resend tier. Simple Stack is cheap on both axes: £49 once for the code, and a stack that runs whole — web server, database, email — on a single VPS costing about £4 a month. Prices below are list prices at the time of writing; they change, so check each product’s own site.
What paid boilerplates cost
| One-time price | Runs whole on one cheap VPS | |
|---|---|---|
| Simple Stack | £49 | |
| ShipFast | $199–$249 | ~ |
| Makerkit | $299–$599 | ~ |
| supastarter | $349 | ~ |
No runtime subscriptions either
The JS boilerplates assume Vercel for hosting, Supabase or a managed Postgres for data, Clerk for auth and Resend for email — four accounts to manage, and four bills the moment you grow past their free tiers. Simple Stack replaces all of them with one box: NGINX + PHP-FPM serve the app, SQLite is the database, auth is built in, and transactional email goes out over SES SMTP for fractions of a penny. The full running-cost breakdown is on the cheap self-hosted boilerplate page, and the head-to-head with the category leader is the ShipFast alternative page.
Common questions
For the code, yes. To run it you add a VPS (about £4 a month), a domain, and Stripe’s per-transaction fees — the same fees every stack pays.
One payment, seven site types, every screen clickable now.
The demos are the trial — no signup, nothing saved. Then it is yours for £49.