open-saas VS htmx

For the even faster start, it also features Open SaaS - a 100% free and open-source boilerplate starter for React & Node.js. Just clone it and get a working app with auth, billing, Open AI API, user dashboard and more!

When building AI Blog Articles, I decided to get started as fast as possible. So I looked for a free boilerplate and stumbled upon Open SaaS, which used YC-backed Wasp. It is a full-stack React + NodeJS + Prisma that takes 8 hours to get started with.

In addition, their CLI can help you start faster too. By running wasp new, you can get yourself a custom template that fits your needs. For example, if you’re building up a new SaaS, you’ll probably find a fit with OpenSaaS or if you’re creating a more specific solution, an AI code generator can help you start quickly if nothing else fits.

9,500 stars and almost 3 years later, here we are today. Wasp is getting close to entering the elite 10,000 stars club on GitHub, next to the giants of the industry. The framework we started, and developed further with the invaluable feedback from the community, is being used by all kinds of developers - from weekend projects, to startups and top enterprises. Startups made with Wasp have been acquired. I just saw a job ad today on Upwork, where a company is hiring for Open SaaS (an open-source, free boilerplate starter for React & Node.js, powered by Wasp) developers 🤯.

These days, I'm building side projects, like Open SaaS pictured above, and working as a developer relations engineer.

Although some people could consider Wasp’s opinionated stance a negative thing, it is the driver behind Wasp’s numerous full-stack features. With Wasp, starting a full-stack project for a single developer or a small team is much easier, especially if you use one of the pre-made templates or OpenSaaS as your SaaS starter. Because the core of the project is well-defined, it is very easy to get started with a project and potentially, make your own full-stack SaaS in a couple of days! What’s also cool is the fact that most of the pre-existing knowledge of web developers for most of them still applies here, because the technologies that Wasp uses are established.

OpenSaaS – I was curious what the latest starter kit for building out SaaS apps looks like. I wrote my own a whole decade ago github.com/eddywashere/node-stripe-membership-saas.

We’ve launched 6 times on Product Hunt in the last 3 years, won “Top Product” awards (#1 and #5 of the day), and collected over 2,000 upvotes in total. We just finished our sixth launch with Open SaaS - an open-source alternative to $300+ SaaS starters, a week ago.

Hey,

a few people have asked me how we got our [open-source SaaS starter](https://github.com/wasp-lang/open-saas) to the front page of GitHub trending, so I thought I'd share the details:

1. started sharing a funny promo [video on twitter](https://x.com/hot_town/status/1752243248439910626?s=20) and reddit

Hi there! I want to show off a little feature I made using hanami, htmx and a little bit of redis + sidekiq.

Recently, I just rewrite one of my application Stashbin from Next.js to GO. Though my main motivation of this migration was to learn GO and experimenting with HTMX. I also aiming to reduce the resource usage of my application and simplify the deployment process. Initially, Stashbin codebase are split into two seperate repository, one for the frontend that uses Next.js and another for the backend that already uses GO. The backend repository is just a REST API responsible for storing and retreiving data from the database.

HTMX is another library that gained popularity due to its server-first approach to rendering data, although seeking a much simpler way of appealing to developers.

When I work with HTMX I need isolated component that can be reusable a form. So I create a PHP Function that generate the Input Datalist.

I was inspired by htmz (which was in turn inspired by htmx) and how the author got pretty close to a basic htmx-like experience just using an iframe. I wanted to push it a little further so whipped this demo together. My submission demonstrates progressive enhancement for the form - with js enabled the request targets an iframe that is inserted into the dom, meaning the page doesn't actually navigate (similar to event.preventDefault()). The iframe receives the html response from the request and on load triggers a function to swap out it's contents into the main page.

As described on htmx.org: "htmx gives you access to AJAX, CSS Transitions, WebSockets and Server Sent Events directly in HTML, using attributes, so you can build modern user interfaces with the simplicity and power of hypertext"

Apart from the source code itself, the repo's README also gives a bit more details about the various packages I used.

1. htmx: https://htmx.org/

Also, there’s some response header juggling you have to do when submitting forms that have a validation step before redirecting: https://github.com/bigskysoftware/htmx/issues/369

I’ve tried to iron out any footguns or server requirements I’ve bumped into while using HTMX & Hotwire in my projects.

✨ In recent months, I have been developing web projects using GOTTHA stack: Go + Templ + Tailwind CSS + htmx + Alpine.js. As soon as I'm ready to talk about all the subtleties and pitfalls, I'll post it on my social networks.