---
title: "We Counted Every Route in 5 Open-Source SaaS Starters. None of Them Build Your Product."
date: 2026-09-13T00:00:00+00:00
source: https://saasreadyit.com/blog/what-5-open-source-saas-starters-actually-ship-route-audit.html
---

# We Counted Every Route in 5 Open-Source SaaS Starters. None of Them Build Your Product.

On 2026-08-23 we cloned five of the most-starred open-source SaaS starter
templates on GitHub and counted every page route each one ships. Together they
hold **53,876 GitHub stars** and **69 routes**.

Not one of those 69 routes is the product.

Every starter gives you a landing page, a login form and a settings screen.
Zero of them give you the page where your user does the thing they came for.
That is the finding, and the route lists below are printed in full so you can
check it against the repos yourself.

## The five starters

| Starter | Repo | Stack | License | Routes | Stars (2026-08-23) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Open SaaS | `wasp-lang/open-saas` | Wasp + React + Prisma | MIT | 9 | 15,569 |
| SaaS Boilerplate | `ixartz/SaaS-Boilerplate` | Next.js + Clerk + Drizzle | MIT | 7 | 7,375 |
| Enterprise SaaS Starter Kit | `boxyhq/saas-starter-kit` | Next.js + NextAuth + Prisma | Apache-2.0 | 30 | 4,912 |
| CMSaasStarter | `scosman/CMSaasStarter` | SvelteKit + Supabase | MIT | 18 | 2,353 |
| React Starter Kit | `kriasoft/react-starter-kit` | Bun + React + tRPC | MIT | 5 | 23,667 |

Star counts are what the GitHub API reported on the audit date. They are not
tracked live, so treat them as a snapshot, not a current figure.

## What they ship, counted

Each row is a page category, how many of the five ship it, and the test used to
count it. The test is stated so you can re-derive each number by hand from the
route lists.

| Page | Ships in | Counted as |
|---|---|---|
| Marketing landing page | **5 / 5** | a route at `/` or inside a marketing route group |
| Sign in / sign up | **5 / 5** | any route matching sign-in, sign-up, login, signup or join |
| Account settings | **5 / 5** | any route matching account, settings or profile |
| Signed-in dashboard | **4 / 5** | a route matching dashboard, demo-app or `/members` |
| Password reset | **3 / 5** | any route matching password, reset or unlock |
| Team / org management | **3 / 5** | any route matching team, organization, members or invitation |
| Billing / subscription | **2 / 5** | any route matching billing or select_plan |
| Pricing page | **2 / 5** | any route matching pricing or select_plan |
| Admin panel | **1 / 5** | any route under an admin segment |
| Blog / content | **1 / 5** | any route matching blog |
| Contact form | **1 / 5** | any route matching contact |
| Search | **1 / 5** | any route matching search |
| **The product's own workflow** | **0 / 5** | a page that captures the user's input, runs the product's core job, or renders its result |

## The three numbers worth arguing about

**0 / 5 ship the product's own workflow.** This is the headline. A SaaS starter
is sold as a head start on a SaaS product, but none of the five contains a page
that takes a user's input, runs a job on it, and shows a result. The nearest
misses were a Stripe checkout-result page and an organisation-selection step —
neither is the product doing its work — plus a generic progress component, which
is not a page at all. We counted it as zero rather than rounding up.

**2 / 5 ship billing.** Subscription revenue is the defining characteristic of
SaaS, and three of the five most-starred SaaS starters leave you to wire up
payments yourself. If you picked a starter assuming billing was handled, check
before you plan your timeline.

**5 / 5 ship authentication.** Auth is the single most reliably solved problem
in the category. It is also the one most founders assume will be the hard part.
It isn't — it's the part everyone has already built for you.

## Why the distribution looks like this

The pattern isn't laziness. It is the only thing a starter template *can* do.

Auth, settings and a landing page are identical across every SaaS product ever
built, so they generalise perfectly and a template can ship them once for
everyone. Your product's core workflow generalises to nothing — it is the part
that differs between your product and every other product, which is precisely
why it's the part you are building a company around.

So the honest reading is not "these starters are bad." Several are excellent at
what they do. The honest reading is that **a starter removes the commodity work
and leaves 100% of the differentiated work**, and the differentiated work is
where essentially all of the schedule risk lives. A founder who budgets two
weeks because "the boilerplate handles it" has budgeted for the part that was
already free.

## What to do with this

Three practical consequences:

1. **Pick a starter for its auth and billing, not its dashboard.** Those are the
   parts you genuinely inherit. Count the billing routes before you commit —
   only two of five have them.
2. **Budget your schedule around the pages that appear in zero starters.** Your
   intake page, your run/processing state, your result view, your share view.
   Nobody has written those for you.
3. **Check the route list, not the README.** Every starter's README describes an
   ambitious product. The `routes` directory describes what actually exists. The
   gap between the two is the work you just signed up for.

## Method, and its limits

Five repositories, cloned and read on 2026-08-23. Page routes were counted from
each project's routing directory; API handlers, middleware and components were
not counted as pages. Where a route was genuinely ambiguous — CMSaasStarter's
`/account` is both its settings area and its signed-in home — it was counted
once, under settings, and the ambiguity is recorded rather than smoothed over.

Limits worth stating plainly: five repositories is a small sample chosen by star
count, not a random sample of the category. Star counts favour older and more
heavily marketed projects. A different five would shift the middle rows of the
table. The 0/5 finding on product workflow is the one we would expect to hold
across any sample, because it follows from what a template can generalise, not
from which templates we picked.

The underlying data — every route, verbatim, per starter — is published and
readable at [saasreadyit.com/designing-your-app](https://saasreadyit.com/designing-your-app),
where each count is shown next to the routes that produced it.

---

*This audit was run by [SaaSReadyit](https://saasreadyit.com), which writes
AI-generated market-validation reports for software ideas. The figures above are
counted from public repositories, not generated by a model.*