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Why Indie Starter?

It is pretty easy to create a boilerplate, but the devil is hidden in the details, when you to create one for a wide range of projects, maintaing it, updating it with best practices.

Indie Starter is more than just a boilerplate—it’s a foundation for your next big project. It’s designed with simplicity, versatility, and modern industry standards in mind. This guide will walk you through the core principles that drive Indie Starter, the tech stack it employs, and why it might be the perfect fit for your next project. Whether you’re building a small personal project or a large-scale application, Indie Starter is designed to help you hit the ground running.

Design Principles

Here are the core design principles to help explain why I built Indie Starter, the problems that it exists to solve, and why Indie Starter may be the best choice for your project.

Beautiful user interface

UI for SaaS landing pages is often undervalued, especially by technically-minded founders. Yet it’s the digital storefront that can make or break a potential user’s first impression. In a sea of alternatives, a well-crafted UI doesn’t just attract attention — it communicates competence, reliability, and an understanding of user needs.

Indie Starter is designed for engineers who solved problems and want to present their solution to the world in a beautiful way.

Minimalistic (Less is more)

The Indie Starter is versatile and can be used for unlimited projects. By not making assumptions about what you will build, it ensures you only use what is needed. Including unnecessary features can result in unused code, potentially slowing down your app and making maintenance more challenging. No bloated code, only what you need.

Tech stack

Included industry-standard tech stack, that are widely used and have a large community.

  • Next.js: Open-source, widely used and have a large community and ecosystem.
  • React: might be not the best libray, but it is open-source, widely used and have a large ecosystem.
  • TailwindCSS: become the new standard for styling and for moderen startups.
  • shadcn/ui: While there are no library can fit all the use cases, shadcn/ui gives full-control over the code, so you can customize it to fit your needs.
  • TypeScript: Type safety, better developer experience, and less runtime errors.
  • Zod: Schema validation and type checking at runtime.
  • Supabase: Open-source, no vendor lock-in, top-notch user-experience powered by Postgres the most reliable DB in the market.
  • pnpm: Fast, disk space efficient package manager.
  • Resend: A simple and powerful email service that you can use to send emails from your app.
  • React Email: A library to build emails using React components.

Although end-users may not be directly affected by the tech stack, its implications ultimately have an impact on them. The selection of a tech stack should prioritize its ease of maintenance, enabling developers to consistently deliver enhanced value and optimal user experiences.

One source of truth

Unified Configuration Management: Simplify configuration handling by consolidating all settings, including environment variables, API endpoints, and database connections, into centralized configuration files. With Indie Starter, you can effortlessly manage all configuration options, ensuring consistency and ease of maintenance.

Developer experience first

we believe that a great developer experience leads to more productivity and better products. We’ve designed our platform to minimize setup time, follow industry best practices, and provide flexibility for customization. Here’s how we put developer experience first:

  • Minimal time to setup, and start working on what’s matter to your customers.
  • Strong default and conventions: following best practices and industry standards.
  • Provide escape hatches: You can always eject from the default setup and customize it to fit your needs.