A $99 MakerKit alternative with billing and admin

Pick MakerKit if you want teams and organizations, i18n, more frameworks and a founder answering in Discord, and you are fine paying $349 or more. Pick MakerKit Lite if you want a free, MIT Supabase starter and plan to add billing yourself. Pick Agentic Boilerplate if you want billing, an admin panel and an agent layer already in the repo, for $99 once. It's free during launch.

Every MakerKit fact below comes from its own site and its Lite repo, checked on October 4, 2026.

At a glance

	MakerKit Pro or Teams	MakerKit Lite	Agentic Boilerplate
Price	$349 Pro or $649 Teams, one-time	Free	$99 once, lifetime access and updates. Free during launch
License	Proprietary. Client work needs the Team license, and each client must hold its own MakerKit license	MIT	Proprietary. Unlimited projects. No reselling the boilerplate
Framework	Next.js 16. Also TanStack Start, React Router and React Native kits	Next.js 16.3, Turborepo	Next.js 16, one app
Auth	Supabase, or Better Auth with Drizzle or Prisma. Password, magic link, passkey, social, MFA	Supabase Auth	Better Auth, Clerk or Supabase Auth
Payments	Stripe. Its docs also cover Lemon Squeezy, Paddle and Polar, by kit	None	Stripe, Polar, Lemon Squeezy, Dodo Payments
Database	Supabase Postgres, Drizzle or Prisma 7	Supabase	Postgres on Neon or Supabase, with Drizzle or Prisma
Agent setup files	AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md at the root and in each package, plus an MCP server	AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md in apps/web, .mcp.json at the root	CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, path-scoped rules, skills, subagents, guard hooks, solution docs, .mcp.json
Admin panel	Super Admin: inspect, impersonate or ban users and teams	No	Yes: users, bans, impersonation, audit log
Design systems	Shadcn UI, Tailwind CSS 4, a Figma UI kit	Shadcn UI, Tailwind CSS 4	31 design systems
Teams and organizations	Yes, with invites and roles	No	No
i18n	Yes	Yes	No

What MakerKit does well

• Track record. Its home page says MakerKit "has shipped and maintained SaaS kits since 2022", full-time. That is years of bug reports already fixed.
• Teams. Organizations, team invites, roles and permissions, and per-seat billing. We have none of it.
• i18n. Every UI string comes from translation files, per its home page. Even Lite has it. We don't.
• More frameworks. Next.js, TanStack Start, React Router, and a React Native kit for mobile. We are Next.js only.
• More auth. Passkeys and MFA. Our Better Auth screens ship neither. With Clerk, passkeys are a dashboard setting.
• It takes agents seriously. AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md in every package, an MCP server in the repo, and support for Claude Code, Cursor, Codex and Gemini. Credit where it is due.
• A person to ask. Its home page offers Discord support from the founder. Teams adds a private Discord channel.
• A free way in. MakerKit Lite is MIT, on GitHub, and shares the paid kits' structure. You can read real MakerKit code before you pay.

Where Agentic Boilerplate is different

Against MakerKit Lite: billing and admin in the box

MakerKit's pricing page says Lite comes "without billing, teams, or the admin panel". Ours ships two of those three:

• Billing. A public /pricing page that renders with no keys, monthly, yearly and one-time prices, and /billing in the app. Stripe, Polar, Lemon Squeezy or Dodo Payments, behind one interface.
• Admin panel. Real users with search and paging, bans with a reason and an expiry, impersonation with a banner, role changes and an audit log.
• Not teams. Neither Lite nor ours has organizations. If you need them, that is the paid MakerKit.

Lite is free and MIT. Ours is $99 after launch. The $99 pays for billing, admin and the agent layer.

Against MakerKit Pro: $99, not $349

• One price: $99 once for lifetime access and updates. No tiers, no subscription.
• MakerKit Pro is $349 and Teams is $649, one-time. $99 is the lowest price of the paid kits we compare: MakerKit, ShipFast and supastarter.
• Both licenses are proprietary. Ours: build as many projects as you want and ship what you build. You can't resell or redistribute the boilerplate itself.

You pick the stack

• 26 batteries: auth, payments, database, ORM, email, storage, analytics, errors, support, blog, AI and admin. One per category, or none.
• Every pair you can pick was installed, typechecked, built and booted together. Untested pairs are greyed out with the reason.
• See one battery up close: Better Auth, Stripe, Polar.
• Read a whole repo before you download it: /stack/indie-saas.

The agent layer, file by file

MakerKit ships agent files too. We have not seen its paid repo, so we won't compare file by file. Ours is generated for the stack you pick. Here is what our Indie SaaS repo ships:

• 30 rules, most scoped to paths. A billing rule loads only when the agent reads a billing file.
• 28 skills, like /edit-pricing, /add-admin-page and /test-webhook.
• 7 subagents, like pr-reviewer, security-auditor and Neon's db-inspector, told to run SELECT and EXPLAIN only.
• 7 guard hooks. They refuse rm -rf, force pushes, git reset --hard and reads of .env.local, and redact live secrets from what the agent sees. bun run verify:hooks proves each one still works.
• 74 solution docs. Known mistakes per battery, written down before you make them. Browse them in the cookbook.

Hooks are wired for Claude Code. Codex and Cursor get the same rules and skills in their own formats.

One app, not a monorepo

MakerKit is a Turborepo with packages. Ours is one Next.js app with src/. Fewer moving parts to learn. Also fewer seams to split along later. Pick what fits your team.

When to pick MakerKit instead

• You sell to teams and need organizations, invites and roles.
• You need i18n.
• You want TanStack Start, React Router or a React Native app.
• You want passkeys and MFA without building them.
• You want a founder on Discord. We have no paid support and no community chat.
• You want years of track record. We are new in 2026, with few public testimonials so far.
• You want free and MIT, on Supabase Auth: MakerKit Lite is a clean start.

How to try it

npm create agentic-boilerplate@latest my-app

Or open /build, pick batteries, and watch the file tree and CLAUDE.md change on every click.

Setting up agent files by hand? Read the CLAUDE.md template and Claude Code setup for Next.js.

More comparisons: best Next.js boilerplates, ShipFast, supastarter.

FAQ

Is MakerKit free?

MakerKit Lite is free and MIT. The full kits are $349 for Pro and $649 for Teams, one-time, per its pricing on October 4, 2026. Other free MIT kits: the Next.js SaaS Starter, ixartz SaaS-Boilerplate, Open SaaS and create-t3-app. Our roundup compares them.

What is the difference between MakerKit Lite and Agentic Boilerplate?

Lite is free and MIT. Ours is free during launch, then $99 once, under a proprietary license. Lite gives you Supabase sign-in, i18n and MakerKit's monorepo structure. Ours gives you a choice of auth, billing on four providers, an admin panel and the agent layer. Lite has i18n. We don't.

What does Agentic Boilerplate cost?

Free during launch. Then $99 once for lifetime access and updates. One price, no tiers, no subscription. Build as many projects as you want.

Does MakerKit ship AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md?

Yes. Its home page says AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md sit at the root and in each package, with an MCP server in the repo. Lite has them in apps/web.

Is Agentic Boilerplate open source?

No. It is closed source, like ShipFast and supastarter. You get every file of the repo you generate, to read and change. You can't resell or redistribute the boilerplate. Want MIT? MakerKit Lite is.

Does Agentic Boilerplate support teams or organizations?

No. No organizations, invites or seat billing. If you need them now, MakerKit or supastarter is the better fit.