I Built a SaaS in a Weekend Using a $49 Starter Kit — Here's Exactly What Happened

I Built a SaaS in a Weekend Using a $49 Starter Kit — Here's Exactly What Happened Friday evening. I had an idea I had been sitting on for two weeks. A simple AI-powered tool for a specific niche — nothing revolutionary, but something people in that niche would genuinely pay for. I gave myself the weekend. Here is what actually happened. Friday Night: Setup (2 hours) I picked up LaunchKit — a Next.js 16 SaaS starter kit I had been eyeing. $49. I have spent more than that on a dinner out. The purchase-to-running-locally pipeline was faster than I expected: Download the zip from Gumroad npm install Copy .env.example to .env.local Set up a Postgres database on Railway (took 4 minutes) Run npx prisma migrate dev npm run dev Twenty minutes later I had a running Next.js app with auth, a working database, and a Stripe checkout flow stubbed out. The first thing I did: actually read the code. Not the docs — the code. LaunchKit is clean enough that the code is self-documenting. App Router, prope