Author
Yui Tanaka curates the ShipGarden gallery, road-testing open-source and source-available SaaS and AI boilerplates and the infrastructure they run on. She writes about time-to-first-deploy, cost, and vendor lock-in for small teams.
Meilisearch, Typesense, and Elasticsearch for search in a Next.js SaaS in 2026: where the engine runs, the license ceiling, and honest where-each-loses, with real repos and costs.
Drizzle, Prisma, and Kysely for the data layer of a Next.js SaaS in 2026: why they are not the same category, real repos and costs, and honest where-each-loses.
Clerk, Auth0, and WorkOS for a Next.js SaaS in 2026: real free tiers, per-user versus per-connection pricing, enterprise SSO cost, and when open-source auth wins.
Mastra, LangChain.js, and LlamaIndex.TS for building AI agents in TypeScript, 2026: stars, license, which is still maintained, and how to choose.
Convex, Supabase, and Firebase are three different bets on your data model and how much you own. A sourced 2026 comparison of free tiers, real costs, lock-in, and which backend fits your Next.js build.
Vercel, Railway, and Render all deploy Next.js, but they own different amounts of your backend. A 2026 decision guide with real costs, free-tier traps, and a self-host escape hatch.
Neon or Supabase for your Next.js SaaS starter in 2026? A curator's honest, source-checked head-to-head: it is not two databases, it is a database vs a whole backend. Branching, scale-to-zero, the pricing that changed, and where each one loses.
An honest gallery review of Payload CMS in 2026: the five ways to deploy the Next.js-native backend, what it really costs, and where it loses.
A hands-on July 2026 review of Convex, the reactive backend and database for Next.js: five deploy paths, real free-tier cost math, the FSL license fine print, and where it loses to Supabase and Neon.
ShipGarden's hands-on June 2026 review of Trigger.dev v4 (v4.4.6 stable, v4.5.0-rc.7 in flight) as the open-source background-jobs platform for Next.js apps. Five deploy paths, real cost-per-10k-runs math, an honest read against Inngest and Convex, and where v4 still bites.
Hands-on June 2026 review of the LlamaIndex.TS RAG starter for Next.js. The starter still works, the project is officially deprecated, and the deploy-paths matrix below has three options that still ship. Honest cost numbers, vector store picks, and what to point a fresh codebase at instead.
Open SaaS 0.24 by Wasp shipped June 11, 2026 with 14.7k stars and the most batteries-included free SaaS starter on the open-source shelf. We curated it into a ShipGarden gallery entry with three solo-founder paths: ship-as-is, replace the Wasp pieces, or escape the DSL. Honest trade-offs, including when Open SaaS is the wrong pick.
