ShipKit vs ShipFast: which one, and when the answer is ShipFast

TL;DR: ShipFast costs $199 and has sold to 8,380 makers. ShipKit costs $149 and is new. Launching one small Next.js app? Buy ShipFast. Need an admin panel, an API that isn't your website, or a second language? ShipFast doesn't include those. ShipKit does.

Every boilerplate comparison on the internet was written by someone selling one of them. Including this one. We sell ShipKit.

So here's the deal: every checkable claim below carries its source and the date we checked it, and the section about where ShipFast beats us runs longer than the section where we win. Read the ShipFast bits with suspicion anyway. That's the correct response to a vendor comparing itself to a rival.

Everything about ShipFast comes from shipfa.st, read on 1 August 2026.

What you're actually buying

ShipFast is one Next.js application. Clone it and everything lives in that single app: pages, API routes, database calls, all of it. The stack on the box reads "Mongo + Mailgun + Stripe + NextJS + Tailwind + NextAuth", with Supabase, Postgres, Resend, SendGrid and Lemon Squeezy available as swaps. Works with JavaScript or TypeScript, App Router or Pages Router.

ShipKit is a monorepo. Your frontend is one app. The API is an Elysia server running as its own process. The admin panel is a third app, behind role-based access control. Underneath: Postgres with Drizzle, Redis, Better Auth, Polar for payments.

One app versus three. Every difference below is downstream of that.

Side by side

	ShipFast	ShipKit
Price	$199 Starter, $249 All-in	$149
Buyers	8,380	a small fraction of that
Shape	one Next.js app	web + API + admin
API	Next.js route handlers	separate Elysia server, 15 modules
Admin panel	not included	users, audit log, files, webhooks, settings, onboarding, RBAC
Database	MongoDB or Supabase	Postgres + Drizzle
i18n	not included	3 locales wired up
Community	Discord + leaderboard	GitHub Discussions
Partner discounts	$1,210 worth	none

Where ShipFast wins

8,380 people bought it. We can't say that, and it's the gap that matters most. Eight thousand developers have already walked into the sharp edges of that codebase and the worst ones got filed down. Nobody has done that for a new boilerplate. You'd be doing it.

One app is less to learn than three. A monorepo means Turborepo, a second runtime you have to keep alive, and a deploy story with more pieces in it. Building a landing page with Stripe on it? That's pure overhead and you'll never get the time back. ShipFast's shape fits small apps properly. Pretending otherwise would be a lie.

You're also buying Marc Lou's audience. 135,000 followers on X, a Discord that's actually busy, a leaderboard. Buy ShipFast and you land next to people shipping the same week you are. We've got GitHub Discussions and a promise to reply inside a business day. Not the same thing, and I won't pretend it is.

$1,210 in partner discounts on tools you were going to pay for regardless. We don't match that.

Oh, and ShipFast runs on the Pages Router and doesn't force TypeScript on you. If that matters to your team, ShipKit has no answer.

Where ShipKit is different

Your API is a real server. Elysia on Bun, 15 modules covering users, admin, API keys, audit, auth providers, checkout, files, notifications, posts, projects, search and webhooks. Not route handlers bolted to a website. The day you add a mobile client or a background worker, they talk to the API instead of to your marketing site.

There's an admin panel. Separate app, own login, and inside it: user management, an audit log, a file browser, a webhook inspector, settings, an onboarding flow. Permissions are modelled as actual tables rather than a role string glued to the user row. ShipFast doesn't have one. It isn't in their feature list and they don't claim it.

Three languages already work. English, Russian, Uzbek, next-intl, locale-prefixed routes. A fourth is a translation file. ShipFast ships no i18n.

Postgres and Drizzle instead of Mongo. Neither is the wrong answer. They're different bets about what your data looks like two years in, and you probably already know which way you lean.

Price

$149 against $199. Fifty dollars shouldn't decide anything here, and if it does, you're choosing a boilerplate for the wrong reason. Both are one-time payments with lifetime updates. Neither is a subscription.

Worth knowing before you buy either: once you're inside a private repository, you have the code. ShipFast says so directly in their FAQ — "After you've got access to the repo, ShipFast is yours forever, so it can't be refunded." That's how this category works generally, so treat the purchase as final and do your reading first.

On updates, fairly

Their FAQ answers "How often is ShipFast updated?" like this:

ShipFast is built for one purpose: to let you launch projects fast, without getting slowed down by constant dependency changes or breaking updates. I use ShipFast every single day for my own projects … and it will always be my go-to boilerplate for anything I launch on the web. That's why you get lifetime updates - if I ever need to improve or fix it for my own launches, you'll get the same update. Last update 6 months ago.

That's a position, not neglect. A boilerplate that stops moving is a boilerplate that won't break your project when you pull. Plenty of people want precisely that, and they're not wrong.

ShipKit runs the other way. The repository was last committed to six days before I wrote this, and that carries its own bill: more churn, more chances an update collides with something you changed. Frequent updates are only a feature if you want the new things more than you want the quiet.

Pick the trade you actually want.

So, which

Buy ShipFast for a single Next.js app, or if you want the biggest community in this category, or a stack that has deliberately stopped moving, or JavaScript and the Pages Router.

Buy ShipKit if you need an admin panel on day one, if something other than a browser will call your API, if you ship in more than one language, or if you'd rather be on Postgres.

Buy neither if the idea isn't validated yet. A boilerplate buys back a week or two of setup. It can't save you from building something nobody wants, and $149 sunk into a project you drop next month is $149 worse than spending nothing.

FAQ

Is ShipKit a ShipFast clone?

The architecture answers this. ShipFast is one Next.js app; ShipKit is a monorepo with a separate Elysia API and a separate admin application. Different assumptions, different amount of ceremony before you're productive.

Why is ShipKit cheaper if it includes more?

Fewer customers. Price tracks track record in this market and ShipFast has 8,380 buyers of it. When ShipKit gets there, $149 won't be the number.

Can I see the code first?

Not the private repo, same as every paid boilerplate. You can see this site, which runs on ShipKit, plus the other production apps listed on the homepage.

Does ShipFast really ship no admin panel?

Their published features cover auth, payments, emails, database, blog, UI components, SEO tags, a pricing section, a FAQ section, email DNS setup, an email webhook and protected API routes. No admin panel on that list, and they make no claim to one.

Sources

• ShipFast pricing, feature list, FAQ and customer count — shipfa.st, read 1 August 2026
• ShipKit contents — the repository buyers receive, inventoried 1 August 2026