It's been a little over 2 months (March 2022) since Nextacular was first introduced and launched. It was an interesting two months as I learned a lot about the market for building SaaS applications through my interaction with different folks. Taking their feedback critically, and understanding how their ideas can be applied to further improve the project.

Nextacular

Nextacular is a boilerplate for building a full-stack application primarily built using Next.JS, Prisma, and Tailwind. It is an Open-source project licensed under the MIT license.

Nextacular offers a suite of features that will generally make the lives of SaaS founders easier helping them focus on developing the core of their SaaS platforms.

What makes Nextacular unique?

While we are providing the basic features needed by most SaaS platforms, we are shifting from a paradigm of code development to low-code development. A plug-and-play approach.

We are improving the boilerplate daily and making the lives of SaaS founders easier and the development experience of developers better.

Who are the intended users?

Within the 2 months that this project was out, I've personally received inquiry emails and messages. It was a unique experience since I was intending to share this only with SaaS founders. However, due to its nature being an open-source project, it turns out that early-stage developers also benefited by dissecting the project, analyzing how it was structured, and using snippets of the code for their own projects with similar tech stack.

Why Open-source?

I decided to follow the Open-source model because I believe that this is the best way that I can distribute Nextacular and improve it further. It is not perfect, but with the community built around it, we can work on features and improvements together.

How will Nextacular be maintained?

Nextacular will be updated once in a while with the changes and improvements. Currently, people are exploring various ways they can extend the project with various ideas, those improvements will eventually be a part of the project.

As of the moment, it is being sponsored by some of the community members via Open Collective, Gumroad tips, and third-party collaboration.

I also want to highlight two of our company sponsors:

Our Growth

Since the launch, there have been more than 350+ demo accounts created (~80% are personal email accounts), 200+ email subscribers, 30+ Discord members, and 5 ongoing projects using Nextacular.

You may check our demo project here: https://demo.nextacular.co/.

To learn more about the project, you may visit our documentation or join our Discord Server.

Features

Nextacular offers a suite of features that will generally make the lives of SaaS founders easier.

• 🔐 Authentication - Login with magic links sent via email and customize other sign-in methods via Next-Auth
• 💿 Database Integration + Prisma (SQL/PostgreSQL) - Integrate your existing relational databases, such as PostgreSQL and MySQL to easily store and retrieve data
• 🤝 Teams & Workspaces - Invite team members to workspaces
• ☁ Multi-tenancy Approach - Serve multiple customers across different subdomains/custom domains with a single unified codebase
• 📜 Landing Page - Modify the existing landing page to suit your needs
• 💸 Billing & Subscription - Connect your Stripe account to start receiving payments from your customers with the power of webhooks and APIs
• 📱 Simple Design Components & Mobile-ready - Built with Tailwind CSS, design can be configured according to your design system
• 🔍 SEO Support - Easily configure the SEO details of your website with built-in components dedicated for meta-information
• 👾 Developer Experience - As an open-source starter kit, Nextacular focuses on how developers can fully customize and utilize Nextacular in building your next SaaS project, thorough documentation (in-progress) is available for you
• 💌 Email Handling - Connect your favorite email delivery service provider, such as SendGrid, Mailgun, and SES
• 🚦 Development Roadmap - Discover more updates via our development roadmap and upvote to prioritize features development

Technologies

Nextacular won't be possible without the following technologies:

• Next.JS - nextjs.org

Next.js gives you the best developer experience with all the features you need for production: hybrid static & server rendering, TypeScript support, smart bundling, route pre-fetching, and more. No config is needed.

• Prisma - prisma.io

Prisma helps app developers build faster and make fewer errors with an open-source database toolkit for PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, SQLite, and MongoDB (Preview).

• Tailwind CSS - tailwindcss.com

A utility-first CSS framework packed with classes like flex, pt-4, text-center and rotate-90 that can be composed to build any design, directly in your markup.

Future of Nextacular

There's a project roadmap available in the Github repository of the project:

https://github.com/nextacular/nextacular/projects/1

Some of the items mentioned in this roadmap is still in development, while some are still in the planning phases.

We are also building a marketplace for developer partners, integrations, templates, and plugins that the founders can easily add to their platforms. This allows them to bring their own technologies and integrations into the stack.

Nonetheless, Nextacular is still in its infancy and lots of features are coming to simplify the setup of SaaS projects. After all, the goal is to make it easier for SaaS founders to go-to-market early. See you in our community!