# MakerKit

Multi-stack SaaS starter family with a genuinely usable free tier

https://topboilerplates.com/makerkit

Framework: Next.js | Pricing: Freemium, from $349 | GitHub stars: 454

## Verdict

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.

## Description

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 and cons

+ 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.

- 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-included
- rbac-roles
- multi-tenant
- teams-orgs
- payments-included
- subscriptions
- landing-page
- admin-dashboard
- blog-cms
- docs-site
- in-app-notifications
- realtime-subscriptions
- i18n
- analytics-integrated
- error-monitoring
- typescript-strict
- e2e-tests
- unit-tests
- monorepo
- open-source
- free-tier
- mit-licensed
- source-available
- one-time-license
- unlimited-projects
- lifetime-updates
- team-license
- resale-prohibited

## Stack

- Tailwind
- shadcn/ui
- Postgres
- Supabase
- Prisma
- Drizzle
- Better Auth
- Supabase Auth
- Stripe
- Paddle
- TypeScript

## Links

- Website: https://topboilerplates.com/go/makerkit
- GitHub: https://github.com/makerkit/nextjs-saas-starter-kit-lite

## Alternatives

- [IndieKit](https://topboilerplates.com/indiekit)
- [Carrot Seed](https://topboilerplates.com/carrot-seed)
- [ShipFast](https://topboilerplates.com/shipfast)