Why Most SaaS Boilerplates Become Technical Debt Within 6 Months

I've reviewed dozens of boilerplates over the past year. Bought some, audited others, watched friends struggle with a few more. And I keep seeing the same pattern play out: Developer buys boilerplate to "save 3 weeks." Developer spends 4 weeks fighting against abstractions they didn't choose. The root problem isn't code quality. Most boilerplates are well-written. The problem is what I call the abstraction trap . The Abstraction Trap Most boilerplates try to be clever. They wrap everything in custom hooks, create proprietary patterns, abstract away the "complexity" of auth and payments. It looks beautiful on the landing page: // "Look how simple our auth is!" const { user , login , logout } = useAuth (); But what happens inside useAuth() ? What happens when you need to: Add a custom claim to your JWT? Handle a specific OAuth provider edge case? Debug why sessions expire randomly for some users? Suddenly you're not debugging your code. You're reverse-engineering someone else's mental mo