MakerKit
Multi-stack SaaS starter family with a genuinely usable free tier
- Best for
- A small team committing to a multi-tenant B2B product for the long haul, who will get their money back from the monorepo structure, test setup and RBAC rather than from launching this weekend.
- Skip if
- You do client or agency work - the Pro license bars it outright, and Team License client work still requires each client to hold their own license. Open-sourcing your build is barred too.
MakerKit is a family of Next.js SaaS starter kits from Giancarlo Buomprisco, sold as a one-time license: $349 for a single developer or $649 for up to five, per stack. There are three separate paid kits - Supabase, Drizzle+Better Auth, and Prisma+Better Auth - each priced and sold on its own; buying one doesn't include the others, and only the Supabase kit also ships a React Router 8 variant. The free MIT-licensed Lite kit (Next.js 16.3 + Supabase) is a Turborepo monorepo with i18n scaffolding, protected routes, shadcn/ui on Base UI with Tailwind v4, Playwright e2e plus unit tests, and TypeScript set to strict with noUncheckedIndexedAccess. Paying unlocks Stripe or Paddle subscriptions, multi-tenant organizations, RBAC, team accounts, a super-admin dashboard, mailers, analytics, and a production database schema. Those paid repos are private, so everything about them comes from the vendor rather than from code anyone can read before buying.
Pros
- The free Lite tier is a real starting point, not a demo stub: Turborepo layout, working Playwright and unit tests, and a strict TypeScript config with noUncheckedIndexedAccess turned on.
- Actively maintained. As of this review (24 Aug 2026), the public Lite repo's last commit landed 4 Aug 2026, so the free tier isn't an abandoned lead magnet.
- The code-quality reputation has real support: an independent review (4.5/5) praises the architecture, documentation, and multi-tenancy work as unusually solid for a boilerplate.
- One-time license, confirmed as lifetime in the site's own structured pricing data - no recurring fee, and the Teams tier covers five developers.
Cons
- The marketing leans on a bundled MCP server and custom AI agent rules for Claude Code, Cursor and Codex. In the free tier, the equivalent files are just auto-generated Next.js scaffolding and the MCP config points at the generic next-devtools package - nothing MakerKit wrote. Whether the paid tiers do better is unknowable from outside, but the one version we can inspect doesn't back the claim.
- Almost the entire product is closed across all three paid kits (Supabase, Drizzle, Prisma) - only the Next.js+Supabase Lite repo and a separate free Expo/React Native kit are public, so the billing, RBAC, admin dashboard and test suite in any paid tier are vendor descriptions you buy on trust.
- The one independently-checkable review of MakerKit lands on it suiting small, long-term teams better than a solo founder trying to launch fast, citing both the price and a steeper setup than lighter kits as the reasons why.
- The Lite/paid gap is wide: no billing, no team accounts, no admin panel and no production database schema in the free version, per the vendor's own comparison. Lite is a decent foundation but not a shippable SaaS.
Features
Auth and access
- Auth included
- RBAC / roles
- Multi-tenant
- Teams / orgs
Payments and billing
- Payments included
- Subscriptions
What's in the box
- Landing page
- Admin dashboard
- Blog / CMS
- Docs site
- In-app notifications
Data and infra
- Realtime subscriptions
Growth and ops
- i18n
- Analytics integrated
- Error monitoring
Quality and DX
- TypeScript strict
- E2E tests
- Unit tests
- Monorepo
Licensing and commercial
- Open source
- Free tier
- MIT licensed
- Source-available
- One-time license
- Unlimited projects
- Lifetime updates
- Team license
- Resale prohibited
Alternatives
IndieKit
Next.js 16 SaaS starter with a free MIT tier and closed-source paid Pro
from $79
Carrot Seed
Multi-platform starter for web, mobile, and desktop apps
ShipFast
Closed-source Next.js SaaS kit from indie hacker Marc Lou