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11 Comments

Anybody interested in a premium Django template?

Does anybody on here use Django to build their products?

The reason I’m asking - It’s been my go to framework for a while, and I’ve got to a stage where I have a templated version which implements pretty much all of the standard functionality that pretty much every startup I build uses, e.g. authentication, email verification, stripe integration with subscription management, frontend templates, email notifications, unit and automated testing, forms, etc.

Im wondering if any other Django devs out there would be interested in buying a template like that, where you can spin up an MVP in Django quickly because a lot of the boring tasks have been handled for you?

Is this something people would pay for? How much would something like this be worth to you?

  1. 1

    Obviously, there are people looking for this kind of stuff. But almost any decision might branch you out and niche the market.

    Choosing Bulma instead of Bootstrap? You lost Bootstrap fans. But if your competitor already got the Boostrap fans you can attach the ones looking for a Balma template.

    Of course some don't care, but for me being as close to my preferences and providing clean and well-tested code is what would interest me.

    1. 1

      Thanks for the feedback, think these are all good points. I’m thinking I can potentially add support for multiple view layers so as to make it useful to as many people as possible. Ultimately the real value add is in the backend functionality, and the frontend layer would be mostly swappable anyway

      1. 1

        I noticed your competitor provides 2 CSS frameworks, but I would keep it simple. Use the one you like, put it out there and you'll see if feedback tells you to make changes.

        Perhaps think of one cool feature that others don't offer yet.

  2. 1

    I've thought of building something like this myself as well - at least for personal use since like you say there is a lot of boilerplate to get the basics up and running for a SAAS app. I've looked into SaaS Pegasus from @czue which looks great but I wanted to build up my own code template for more flexibility. That being said I could see purchasing SaaS Pegasus in the future. One thing I think would be nice is if one could pick which features they needed and only pay for that.

    ie. subscriptions + email verification flows for example

    This could help with tiered pricing since when you are just getting a project up and running to test an idea sometimes you don't want to spend the money for all the things but just the pieces that
    a) you are less familiar with
    b) are the most time consuming
    c) you don't care about customizing as much

    All that being said, I'm probably not the best target market since I'm more experienced with Django and like to build this stuff myself - but If I had my idea validated and just wanted to build really quickly I see a lot of value in having a maintained template that I purchased.

    1. 1

      That all makes sense to me, though I do find with Pegasus that a growing number customers are people like you who are very experienced but still want to have a thought-through and well-maintained thing. But yeah, if you already have built the equivalent of Pegasus for yourself exactly how you like it then it's hard to compete with that!

      Re: feature-based pricing - I agree! I actually just changed the distribution model of Pegasus to be built server-side instead of after download by the customer, which unlocks the ability to do per-feature pricing.

      1. 1

        Yeah I agree that the maintenance is probably one of the biggest benefits. Even if I can build up my own collection of patterns to reuse, if I don’t use it for a year then I will need to update packages and API versions for stripe etc, whereas Pegasus is always up to date. I think it’s a great product - and I see your working on a tailwind version :)

    2. 1

      Thanks, this is great feedback. I’m thinking my MVP for this is going to be basically clean up and document what I have and stick it on theme forest to see what happens.

  3. 1

    This is a crazy idea. ;)

      1. 1

        Check my profile.

        In all seriousness, there is a market. Attempting to enter into it may or may not be a good idea for you. On the one hand Django is surprisingly niche among the types of people who have this need. On the other hand, that means the space of premium Django boilerplates is less competitive than e.g. JS or Rails. In fact, as of today, I think SaaS Pegasus (my product) would be your only serious competition.

        Wasn't trying to throw shade, just having a little fun.

        1. 1

          Ah totally went over my head, sorry. Yeah my thinking is that there’s loads of frontend templates out there, but not much out there that implements a lot of backend functionality whereas in reality there is a lot of common functions that most MVP products use

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