Using a Template
phaidenbauer • 23 Feb 2024 •
As I’ve written, I bought the shipfa.st Template. And although it looked good at the start, I’ve been working with it a few hours now, and I’m not sold.
Sure, I got stripe stuff up today and a basic “buy here” flow, but the Error handling is basically non-existent. The Code is good, but bare minimum. The synopsis of “shipping things faster because you don’t have to handle things yourself” just doesn’t work out for me. Of course, the template is there to generate money for the template creator, but for $199 I expected more.
So now I’m in the predicament if I should continue using the template or start over again and just use it as a reference to implement certain stuff. I’m still early in the project, so switching isn’t really a problem, but on the other side, should I really get rid of it? The perfectionist in me yells YES, really loud. As I know, I won’t be able to keep my quality expectations with the template.
One thing I learned again now, the hard (or expensive way), if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
Comments
That’s what I struggle with when it comes to boilerplates. It’s never exactly what I need, the plugins/integration I prefer. I wanted to buy a Nuxt boilerplate once but thinking of having to switch all the plugins and packages made me wonder if I can just make my own…
Just curious: Beside error handling, what else is missing in shipfast?
@drodol That’s what I’m doing now :)
@jasonleow Well, the Nextjs Boilerplate (“create-next-app”) works perfectly fine for me. But I thought the template would have more helping stuff. Only MongoDB/mongoose was one of the dealbreakers I discovered too late. I’m an SQL guy and need Postgres/MySQL as I had some pretty bad experiences with MongoDB in the past.
And everything is heavily reliant on those connections. I thought there might be an abstraction layer so you could quickly switch libraries. But there isn’t, so if you want to change DB tech, you need to rewrite a bunch of code. Interestingly, changing Mailgun for Postmark was relatively easy on the other end.
In six months, there were “only” 85 commits to the template repository. There are even several Issues and PRs open, but the author just ignores them and refers to the discord. It almost feels like he doesn’t care about it (although there was an update just a few days ago).
It’s a bit disappointing to hear, but good to hear you are building your own.
@phaidenbauer I see. Interesting how stark the contrast is between the customer’s experience and how he tweets about it. But to be expected I guess…
Not sure if you’re still in the market of finding another boilerplate - I made this SaaS Starters directory - https://listskit.com/saasstarters and has other well built boilerplates too, I think some that has Postgres integration, and not just Next boilerplates.
@jasonleow I think I’ve got the link to the shipfast from your list :) I’ll stick to the things I know for now (“A burnt child dreads the fire”).
@phaidenbauer Yeah I would too. There’s Nextjs boilerplates in there that uses Postgres too I believe, like https://supastarter.dev/products/starter-kits/nextjs
I fully understand what you mean. What about taking the time to kind of build your own from it?