ShipFast vs Shipped.club: Which Gets You to Market Faster?
Two Boilerplates, One Promise
Both ShipFast and Shipped.club sell the same dream: stop rebuilding auth, payments, and landing pages from scratch and launch your SaaS in days instead of months.
ShipFast is the established heavyweight. Built by Marc Lou, used by 8,000+ makers, and responsible for products generating over a million dollars in combined MRR. It is the boilerplate that defined the indie hacker launch playbook.
Shipped.club is the newer contender. Built by Luca Restagno, it takes a broader approach — AI service integrations, Lemon Squeezy as the default payment processor, workspace and organization support, and a Chrome Extension boilerplate bundled in. It targets founders who want flexibility without the premium price tag.
They overlap on the fundamentals but diverge on philosophy, community, and what "shipping fast" actually means in practice.
TL;DR
ShipFast ($199-$299) is the battle-tested Next.js boilerplate with the largest indie hacker community and a proven track record of shipped products. Shipped.club ($157-$207) is a more affordable alternative with built-in AI service integrations, Lemon Squeezy-first payments, and workspace support. Choose ShipFast for the community and proven ecosystem. Choose Shipped.club for the lower price point, AI integrations, and Lemon Squeezy-native billing.
Key Takeaways
- ShipFast has the larger ecosystem by a wide margin. 8,000+ makers, 5,000+ Discord members, a revenue leaderboard, and years of real-world validation. Shipped.club has a smaller Discord community and fewer documented success stories.
- Shipped.club is more affordable. $157 one-time versus ShipFast's $199 base tier. Both include lifetime updates and unlimited projects.
- AI service integrations are Shipped.club's differentiator. Pre-built integrations with OpenAI, Anthropic, and other AI providers are included. ShipFast focuses on AI-assisted development (working with Cursor, Copilot, Claude) rather than shipping AI features to end users.
- ShipFast defaults to Stripe. Shipped.club defaults to Lemon Squeezy. Both support the other, but the default matters — it is the integration that is fully wired, tested, and documented out of the box.
- Shipped.club includes basic workspace and organization features. ShipFast has no multi-tenancy. For solo-user B2C products this does not matter, but for team-based products it is a meaningful head start.
- ShipFast offers more database flexibility. MongoDB or Supabase, both production-ready. Shipped.club uses Prisma ORM with support for PostgreSQL, MySQL, or MongoDB.
- Neither charges a subscription. Both are one-time purchases with lifetime updates and unlimited projects.
Head-to-Head Feature Comparison
| Feature | ShipFast | Shipped.club |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $199 (Starter) | $157 (SaaS Boilerplate) |
| Top Tier | $299 (Bundle with CodeFast) | $207 (SaaS + Chrome Extension) |
| Framework | Next.js | Next.js 14 |
| Language | JavaScript or TypeScript | TypeScript |
| Auth | NextAuth (Google OAuth, Magic Links) | NextAuth + Supabase Auth (Email, Magic Links, Google, Apple, 60+ social providers) |
| Default Payments | Stripe | Lemon Squeezy |
| Alt Payments | Lemon Squeezy | Stripe |
| Database | MongoDB or Supabase | Prisma ORM (PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB) |
| Mailgun or Resend | MailChimp, Loops, AWS SES, SendGrid | |
| AI Integrations | AI-assisted dev (Cursor, Copilot, Claude) | AI service APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic) |
| SEO | Yes (meta tags, blog) | Yes (meta tags, sitemap, social cards) |
| Blog | MDX | Yes |
| Landing Page | Yes (templates) | Yes (hero, pricing, waitlist, pre-sale) |
| Dark Mode | No | Yes |
| Workspaces/Orgs | No | Yes (basic) |
| Onboarding Flow | No | Yes |
| Chrome Extension | No | Yes (add-on tier) |
| UI Components | Tailwind CSS + custom | Chakra UI + Tailwind CSS + shadcn/ui |
| Analytics | No | Yes (privacy-focused) |
| Customer Support Widget | No | Yes |
| Community | 5,000+ Discord, revenue leaderboard | Smaller Discord community |
| Docs | Task-oriented guides | Comprehensive docs site |
| Updates | Periodic | Weekly |
| Makers Using It | 8,000+ | 290+ |
Pricing Breakdown
ShipFast: $199-$299
ShipFast offers three tiers:
- Starter ($199): The full Next.js boilerplate — auth, payments, email, SEO, blog, landing page components, Discord community access, and $1,210 in partner discounts.
- All-in ($249): Everything in Starter with additional resources.
- Bundle ($299): Adds CodeFast, Marc Lou's 12-hour coding course on building and launching SaaS products.
One-time payment. Lifetime updates. Unlimited projects. No seat restrictions.
Shipped.club: $157-$207
Shipped.club offers two tiers:
- SaaS Boilerplate ($157): Full Next.js boilerplate with auth, payments, email, database, landing pages, AI integrations, Discord community access, and documentation.
- SaaS + Chrome Extension ($207): Everything above plus a React Chrome Extension boilerplate with extension auth, content injection, page reading, and background scripts.
One-time payment. Lifetime updates. Unlimited commercial projects. No redistribution allowed.
The Price Gap
Shipped.club undercuts ShipFast by $42 on the base tier. That is real money for a bootstrapped founder, but it is not the full picture. The value calculation depends on what each dollar buys:
| What you get | ShipFast ($199) | Shipped.club ($157) |
|---|---|---|
| Core SaaS boilerplate | Yes | Yes |
| Proven community (5,000+) | Yes | No |
| Partner discounts ($1,210) | Yes | No |
| AI service integrations | No | Yes |
| Chrome Extension boilerplate | No | $207 tier |
| Revenue leaderboard / launch audience | Yes | No |
If you value community, partner discounts, and a built-in launch audience, ShipFast's $199 delivers more total value. If you need AI integrations and want the lowest entry price, Shipped.club's $157 is the better deal.
Feature Deep Dive
Authentication
ShipFast uses NextAuth.js with Google OAuth and magic link sign-in pre-configured. Battle-tested across thousands of projects, well-documented, and every Next.js tutorial covers it. The limitation: no social providers beyond Google without manual setup, and no passkeys or MFA.
Shipped.club offers both NextAuth and Supabase Auth, giving you two authentication paths. Social login support extends to Google, Apple, and 60+ additional providers through Supabase. Magic links and email/password are both included. If your audience expects Apple Sign-In or you are building a developer tool where GitHub OAuth is table stakes, Shipped.club saves you the integration work.
Both handle the 80% case — Google OAuth and magic links. The difference matters if you need broader social provider support.
Payments and Billing
This is where the two boilerplates make fundamentally different bets.
ShipFast defaults to Stripe. Checkout flows, webhook handlers, and subscription management are pre-built and production-ready. Stripe is the payment infrastructure most developers know and most SaaS products use. Lemon Squeezy is also supported as an alternative.
Shipped.club defaults to Lemon Squeezy. The entire payment lifecycle — subscriptions, one-time purchases, webhook integration, test mode — is built around Lemon Squeezy as the Merchant of Record. This means Lemon Squeezy handles sales tax, VAT, and international tax compliance on your behalf. For indie hackers selling globally — especially those without a US business entity — this eliminates a real pain point. Stripe support is available but requires additional webhook implementation.
The trade-off is clear: Shipped.club optimizes for global solo founders, ShipFast optimizes for the developer majority who already know Stripe.
AI Features: Different Approaches
ShipFast and Shipped.club both mention AI, but they mean completely different things.
ShipFast's AI story is about developer workflow. The codebase is optimized for AI coding assistants — Cursor, Copilot, Claude, ChatGPT, and others. This is valuable for development but ships nothing AI-related to your end users.
Shipped.club includes pre-built AI service integrations. OpenAI, Anthropic, and other providers are wired up with API route handlers. If you are building an AI-powered product — a writing tool, a chatbot, a code assistant — these integrations save real setup time. If your product is a standard SaaS, they are irrelevant.
Landing Pages and SEO
ShipFast ships with conversion-oriented landing page templates — hero sections, feature grids, pricing tables, testimonials — and a built-in MDX blog with proper meta tags. Marc Lou's own products demonstrate the template quality.
Shipped.club includes landing page, waitlist, pre-sale, and pricing page templates with automatic sitemap generation and social preview cards for Twitter and Open Graph. The waitlist and pre-sale pages let you validate demand before building the product.
Both handle SEO fundamentals. Shipped.club edges ahead with automatic sitemaps and social cards. ShipFast has more proven visual design thanks to years of iteration.
Email and Extras
ShipFast integrates with Mailgun or Resend for transactional emails. Shipped.club offers MailChimp and Loops for newsletters and drip campaigns, plus AWS SES and SendGrid for transactional emails — more options and built-in marketing email support.
Shipped.club also bundles dark mode, an onboarding flow, privacy-focused analytics, a customer support widget, basic workspace and organization support, and a Chrome Extension boilerplate (in the $207 tier). None of these individually justify choosing one boilerplate over the other, but collectively they mean less integration work in your first weeks.
Code Quality and Architecture
ShipFast is a single Next.js application with a flat, feature-organized directory structure. No abstraction layers, no monorepo complexity. It supports both JavaScript and TypeScript, both App Router and Pages Router. You can read the entire codebase in an afternoon. The trade-off: the flat architecture prioritizes readability over long-term maintainability.
Shipped.club uses Next.js 14 with TypeScript, Prisma ORM, and a component library combining Chakra UI, Tailwind CSS, and shadcn/ui. The TypeScript-first approach and Prisma's type-safe database queries create a more structured codebase. The mix of three UI systems provides component variety but means three styling paradigms coexisting in one project.
Update cadence favors Shipped.club — weekly updates versus ShipFast's more sporadic schedule. For a boilerplate you plan to pull updates from over time, consistent maintenance matters.
Community and Ecosystem
This is ShipFast's most decisive advantage.
Marc Lou's Discord has 5,000+ active makers. The revenue leaderboard — where founders post Stripe-verified MRR — creates genuine engagement. 8,000+ makers have purchased ShipFast, and products built on it have generated over $1M in combined MRR. That means almost every problem you will hit has been solved before, code snippets and integration recipes are shared regularly, and the community functions as a distribution channel when you launch. Marc Lou's personal brand (135,000+ Twitter followers, Product Hunt Maker of the Year 2023) brings visibility to the entire ecosystem.
Shipped.club has 290+ makers and a smaller private Discord. The creator, Luca Restagno, provides direct support and maintains comprehensive documentation at docs.shipped.club. The community is smaller by an order of magnitude, so you are more likely to rely on documentation and direct creator support than peer help. Community size compounds — more users means more shared solutions, more bug reports, and more confidence in long-term maintenance.
When to Choose ShipFast
- You want a proven boilerplate. 8,000+ makers, years of production use, documented successes across hundreds of products.
- Community is a priority. 5,000+ Discord members, a revenue leaderboard, and a built-in launch audience.
- Stripe is your payment processor. You are selling in Stripe-supported markets and want the most battle-tested integration.
- You want MongoDB. If your data model fits documents better than relational tables, ShipFast's MongoDB option is ready to go.
- You rely on AI coding assistants. The codebase is explicitly optimized for Cursor, Copilot, Claude, and other AI dev tools.
- You prefer JavaScript flexibility. ShipFast supports both JS and TS, both App Router and Pages Router.
Best for: MVPs, indie hacker projects, straightforward B2C SaaS, products where you want the safety net of a massive community. Estimated time to launch: 1-3 days.
When to Choose Shipped.club
- You are building an AI-powered product. Pre-built OpenAI and Anthropic integrations save real integration time.
- You want Lemon Squeezy as your MoR. If you are a solo founder selling globally without a US entity, Lemon Squeezy handling tax compliance is a genuine advantage.
- Budget is the deciding factor. $157 versus $199. Every dollar matters pre-revenue.
- You need a Chrome Extension. The $207 tier includes a React Chrome Extension boilerplate — a unique offering in the boilerplate space.
- You want dark mode, onboarding, and analytics out of the box. These small features add up to less integration work in your first weeks.
- You prefer TypeScript-first. Shipped.club is TypeScript throughout with Prisma for type-safe database access.
- You need basic workspace and organization support. Shipped.club includes foundational multi-user features that ShipFast does not.
Best for: AI-powered tools, Chrome Extension products, globally distributed solo founders, budget-conscious launches. Estimated time to launch: 2-5 days.
Verdict
Both boilerplates deliver on the core promise — auth, payments, email, a landing page, and a database wired up in a Next.js app, ready for your business logic. The difference is everything around that core.
ShipFast's advantage is its ecosystem. When you buy ShipFast, you are not just buying code — you are buying access to a community of 5,000+ makers that will help you ship, launch, and grow.
Shipped.club's advantage is its feature breadth at a lower price. AI service integrations, Lemon Squeezy-first payments, workspace support, and a Chrome Extension boilerplate — all for $42 less than ShipFast's base tier.
The deciding question: what do you value more — a proven community or a broader feature set?
If community and track record matter most — ShipFast. When you are stuck at 2 AM debugging a Stripe webhook, five thousand developers who have been there before is worth more than any feature checklist.
If you are building an AI product, need Lemon Squeezy as your payment backbone, or want a Chrome Extension boilerplate — Shipped.club is the more practical starting point.
For the majority of indie hackers building a standard SaaS product, ShipFast remains the safer bet. The community is a durable advantage that newer entrants cannot replicate quickly.
Methodology
This comparison is based on publicly available information from both products' official websites, documentation, pricing pages, and feature lists as of March 2026. We evaluated both products across pricing, features, tech stack, code architecture, developer experience, community, and total cost of ownership.
Feature claims were verified against official documentation and product pages. Pricing reflects the standard publicly listed prices at the time of writing and may change. We have no affiliate relationship with either product that would influence our recommendations.
Looking for more boilerplate comparisons? StarterPick has side-by-side feature breakdowns, community reviews, and stack analysis for dozens of SaaS boilerplates — so you can find the right one without the research rabbit hole.