Full time job + $3k/month side project. Next idea? Stop rebuilding the same sh**
Hey everyone,
I work full-time as a software engineer and run a side project making $2.5-3k/month. Not quitting my job money but enough to keep me going.
Heres my problem. Every time I want to test a new idea I spend weeks setting up the same stuff. Auth, payments, emails, SEO, blog. And then halfway through I realize I picked the wrong payment provider or I need magic links instead of passwords. Then I gotta refactor everything.
So im building Launcho.dev A Next.js boilerplate where you can actually swap things out without rewriting half your codebase.
What I mean by configurable:
Want Stripe? Cool. Want Lemonsqueezy instead? Change one config. Want both and let users pick? Cool, also possible :)
Same with auth:
- Email/password
- Magic links
- OTP codes
- OAuth (google, github, etc)
- SSO for enterprise
- SCIM provisioning
Its all there. You just enable what you need. Building a simple saas? Use magic links. Got enterprise clients? Turn on SSO and SCIM. You dont have to rebuild anything.
Thats the whole point. I kept finding boilerplates that were opinionated in the wrong ways. Hardcoded to one payment provider. Auth that only works one way. I need something flexible because I dont always know what I need until im building.
Things im evaluating:
Theres so many options for each category honestly. Still figuring out which ones to support at launch:
- Analytics: Google Analytics vs Vercel Analytics vs Umami vs Plausible vs OpenPanel vs PostHog
- Payments: Stripe vs Lemonsqueezy vs Polar
- Background jobs: Inngest vs Trigger.dev
- Redis/rate limiting: Upstash vs Redis Cloud
- Error tracking: Sentry vs LogRocket vs Highlight
- Email: Resend vs Plunk vs Postmark
- AI search: llms.txt support
Probably can't ship all of them day one. But the goal is making it easy to swap between them.
Why building in public?
I want to stay accountable honestly. Working full time means some weeks I get nothing done. But posting progress keeps me going.
Im documenting everything on the blog: https://launcho.dev/blog
Technical decisions, what im adding, what broke, what I learned. Not polished marketing content. Just real updates when I have time to write them.
If you want to follow along or see the roadmap thats where it will be. I try to post regularly but you know how it is with a job and life and everything else.
I'd also appreciate anybody writing any kind of blogs for dofollow backlinks for my platform. Also any kind of technologies I should look into is highly appreciated.
Early stage of startup for YouTubers
The configurability angle is smart. Most boilerplates force you into their stack decisions, then you spend the same time ripping things out that you would have spent setting them up from scratch.
The auth flexibility especially resonates - I've been in that exact situation where I started with password auth and then an enterprise customer needed SSO, and the migration was painful.
One thing I've noticed with configurable systems: the real test isn't adding options, it's keeping the DX clean when there are 20 possible combinations. How are you handling that? Feature flags with conditional imports, or some kind of plugin architecture?
For your tooling decisions - Resend has been solid for transactional email if you want something simple. For background jobs, Inngest's event-driven model tends to be cleaner for SaaS workflows than the cron-style approach, at least in my experience.
Love what you’re building with this. I’m definitely interested and would like to join a waitlist if possible