ShipKit vs MakerKit (2026): the honest version

TL;DR: MakerKit is $349, mature, and ships organizations, passkeys and MFA across four frameworks. ShipKit is $149 and ships one opinionated Bun stack with a standalone API and merchant-of-record payments. If you need multi-tenant teams in production this month, buy MakerKit — the rest of this page is about when the $200 difference is the smarter trade.

We sell ShipKit. Read this accordingly.

Everything below about MakerKit comes from makerkit.dev — the pricing page, the FAQ and the blog — checked 3 August 2026. As with our other comparisons, the section arguing for the competitor is the longest one on the page.

What MakerKit is

A family of SaaS starter kits by Giancarlo Buomprisco, a builder with nearly 15 years of engineering behind him. You pick a framework — Next.js 16, TanStack Start, React Router or Remix — and a data layer: Supabase, Drizzle, or Prisma, the latter two paired with Better Auth. Same feature set across all of them: marketing pages, auth, billing, blog, docs, super admin, teams.

Pricing is one-time: Pro at $349 (one seat, unlimited projects) and Teams at $649 (up to 5 collaborators). Freelancers can build for clients, but each client needs their own licence. No refunds — the FAQ says plainly that "due to the non-returnable nature of this product, we generally cannot offer refunds." We say the same thing about ShipKit, and for the same reason: you cannot return source code.

Where MakerKit wins

Multi-tenancy exists today. Organizations, team invitations, role-based access control, per-seat billing. If your product is B2B and customers arrive as companies rather than individuals, this is not a nice-to-have — it is the product. ShipKit does not have organizations yet. That work is in progress, but you would be buying a roadmap; MakerKit sells the shipped thing.

The auth goes deeper. Passkeys, TOTP-based MFA, impersonation from the admin panel. We run the same Better Auth library MakerKit's Drizzle and Prisma kits use, with fewer of its plugins turned on. Their configuration is ahead of ours, on our own auth stack — that is about as direct as a comparison gets.

You choose your stack. Four frameworks times three data layers. If your team already lives in Supabase, or wants Prisma, or bet on TanStack, MakerKit meets you there. ShipKit made every one of those decisions for you, and if you disagree with one, you are fighting the codebase.

Track record. MakerKit claims hundreds of SaaS products in production, showcases dozens of customer projects, and the blog is genuinely alive — three substantial posts in July 2026 alone, including a working pattern for Postgres row-level security. A maintained product with years of buyers is a different risk profile from a new one with 4 customers. That asymmetry is real and no feature list on our side cancels it.

The extras are professional-grade. A Figma UI kit, Playwright end-to-end tests, Stripe billing that already handles per-seat and usage-based pricing. These are the things that look optional until week three.

Where ShipKit is different

Not "better across the board" — different, in ways that matter to a specific buyer.

The API is a separate server. ShipKit's backend is Elysia on Bun: 15 modules behind a real REST API, deployable and scalable on its own. MakerKit's backend lives inside the web framework. The day something other than your website needs to call your API — a mobile app, a partner integration, a CLI — the standalone shape stops being a preference and starts being the architecture you wish you had.

Payments are merchant-of-record. ShipKit wires Polar, which sells to your customers on your behalf and handles global sales tax. MakerKit wires Stripe, which is more flexible and more mature — and leaves VAT registration, tax thresholds and compliance to you. For a solo founder selling worldwide, "someone else files the tax" is worth real money and real sleep.

Bun end to end. Runtime, package manager, test runner, one binary to deploy behind nginx. If you have decided the Bun bet is worth making — we wrote a whole piece on when it is — ShipKit is the boilerplate that already made it. MakerKit runs on Node.

The admin panel is its own app. Separate Next.js application behind RBAC, isolated by architecture rather than by an if statement. MakerKit's super admin is a protected area of the same app — a legitimate design, but a different blast radius when something goes wrong.

$149 against $349. Same licence shape — one-time, unlimited projects — at $200 less. If the feature gap above does not apply to your product, the gap in price does.

The honest asymmetry

MakerKit is the safer purchase. It has more features, more buyers, more history. Recommending it for B2B multi-tenant products is not generosity — it is just true.

ShipKit is the sharper purchase for a narrower buyer: someone building a single-tenant product on Bun, who wants a standalone API, merchant-of-record payments, and $200 back. That buyer exists — we were that buyer, which is why the kit exists.

So, which

MakerKit if you need teams and organizations now, if you want to pick your own framework and database, or if Stripe's billing flexibility is core to your model.

ShipKit if the Bun/Elysia stack is the draw, if you want tax handled by a merchant of record, if the API must stand alone, or if the budget conversation matters.

FAQ

Is ShipKit a MakerKit clone?

No. Different runtime (Bun vs Node), different API shape (standalone Elysia server vs in-framework), different payments model (Polar as merchant of record vs Stripe). The overlap is the category, not the code.

Does ShipKit have organizations and team accounts?

Not today. It ships single-tenant with role-based access control in the admin app. Organizations, passkeys and MFA are in active development — but if you need them this month, MakerKit has them now, and that FAQ answer is the whole point of this page.

Why is MakerKit more than twice the price?

More shipped surface: multi-tenancy, deeper auth, four frameworks, a Figma kit, E2E tests, years of maintenance. Whether that surface is worth $200 depends entirely on whether your product needs it. B2B with teams: usually yes. Solo-founder single-tenant SaaS: often no.

Do either of you offer refunds?

Neither does. MakerKit's FAQ and ours say effectively the same thing: source code cannot be returned. Read the docs, ask questions, decide before paying.

Sources

• Pricing, tiers and licence — makerkit.dev, checked 3 August 2026
• Refund policy and client-work terms — makerkit.dev FAQ, checked 3 August 2026
• Stack variants and release cadence — makerkit.dev blog, checked 3 August 2026
• ShipKit contents — the repository buyers receive, inventoried 3 August 2026