Who Uses SaaS Templates for Their Projects?

As software engineers we often get seduced by the allure of boilerplates. They make promises of saving you time on tooling configuration, showing you clean code patterns within your repo, and . These templates and their makers preach the good word of staying DRY, and we love to listen to that gospel. 🙌

But for many software engineers, templates and boilerplates often fall short of our expectations & needs. Boilerplate seems to swing wildly between two extremes: either too basic, or too complex.

When boilerplate falls into the category of too basic we see that it gets mass adoption, but leaves us with a lot of additional work to do to create software of any consequence. Ex: Create React App is great for quickly spinning up a local react project, but it's a far cry from being production ready.

And when boilerplate falls into the category of too complex, we complain about the choices that were made by the boilerplate creator.

"Why did they build this template with Vue instead of React?" 🧐
"Why did they use JS over TS?" 😲
"Who would create a folder structure like this?" 😱

This leads to us ripping the template apart, or ditching it all together, while uttering the mantra

"I could have done this so much better" 😒

There seems to be a trend right now of indie hackers creating templates and boilerplates that aim to strike a balance between these two extremes. Theses new boilerplates take care of the configuration tasks, and offer multiple options on how to setup subscriptions, auth, and api call within the app. I'm excited to see more of these mama bear sized offerings in the future.

Here are a few notable ones:

• https://shipfa.st/
• https://create.t3.gg/
• https://vercel.com/templates
• https://thecodingmachine.github.io/react-native-boilerplate/

Follow along as I choose a boilerplate for my latest mobile app:
https://youtu.be/5DyzCdQIR8w

Do you have a go-to boilerplate that you use on the projects? Let me know about it in the comments!