How I Built a Production-Ready Next.js SaaS Boilerplate You Can Actually Use

Every side project I've started in the last two years began the same way. Open VS Code. Create a new Next.js app. Start wiring up authentication. Three days later I'm debugging a NextAuth callback, Stripe webhooks aren't firing, and I haven't touched the actual idea I was excited about. The setup tax is real — and it quietly kills more projects than bad ideas ever do. So I stopped starting products and started building the foundation I kept rebuilding. This is what I learned, what I built, and why I made the decisions I did. The stack No exotic choices here. Everything is boring on purpose. Next.js 14 (App Router) — stable, well-documented, widely understood NextAuth v5 — handles OAuth + credentials auth without reinventing the wheel Prisma — type-safe ORM that plays nicely with the App Router Stripe — payments and webhooks, subscription-ready React Email + Resend — transactional emails that actually land in the inbox MySQL — straightforward, production-proven, no surprises Tailwind CS