I'm looking for an affordable starter kit (<$200) that allows me to validate many product ideas quickly.
what is the real goal of this post? gauge the market? somehow funnel to your thing? (honestly curious)
//edit I see you already used another account to answer yourself with recommendation of your product
IDK if the solopreneur thing has intensified so much recently, but almost every time I see a thread like that, here or on reddit, it's posted by the creator of the tool and he somehow tries to sneak his product in
for anyone browsing for a starter kit I recommend laravel with a starter kit and laravel stripe package: https://laravel.com/docs/10.x/starter-kits + https://laravel.com/docs/10.x/billing
If you don't already know a tech stack, just pick one and learn it. Then you do know one and can re-use it as you wish.
But "best" is such a subjective term, it always depends on what you really need. Better to pick one and run than get caught in analysis paralysis.
One of the primary benefits is you can quickly explore what Cloud components you need (locally) before purchasing them. We also built a bunch of templates in different languages that act as application boilerplate.
If it works the way you want in Workshop you can launch right to the cloud. If not it's easy to find alternative hosts for the different components. After all, Noop uses many AWS services under the hood.
The interface for local development is almost identical to the cloud interface, so it will give you a pretty clear idea of what the experience will be like in deployed environments.
Like others have said, pick the tech you want to use first, then find a good one that uses that tech! I would look for reviews, a history of updates, and a founder who knows their stuff.
There's many directories listing them - probably the most comprehensive one is here: https://github.com/smirnov-am/awesome-saas-boilerplates
Good luck!
A better question would be: what should I look for in a SaaS starter kit?
You will get a lot of opinionated responses, but for me at least, what I'm most interested in:
- admin dashboard
- ability to integrate/generate different billing/invoice/payment options
- multiuser strategy
- deploy options
Is the chosen starter kit good? Clues may lie in licenses, the repo if source is available, if paid is there a money back guarantee, is it maintained, is the code any good (do they know what they are doing?). Does it meet your functional and nonfunctional requirements?
Take this as advise for a lonely programmer OR (!) user feedback for your gig (!!) ;)
That's a nice selection of Starter Kits.