Launcho | The Ultimate Next.js 16 AI Boilerplate

I've shipped two profitable SaaS products in the past year. Both times, I wasted over 100 hours setting up the same infrastructure: auth flows, payment webhooks, email delivery, error tracking, and analytics.

That's 100 hours I could've spent building features that actually make money.

Launcho eliminates that waste. It's a production-grade Next.js 16 boilerplate with everything pre-configured, deploy to Vercel and start charging customers the same day.

This post breaks down every piece of Launcho's foundation: what's included, why I chose each tool, and how they work together to save you months of setup time.

The Infrastructure Tax Every Founder Pays

Before you can charge your first customer, you need to build secure authentication that won't get you hacked, subscription billing with webhooks that actually work, email delivery that doesn't land in spam, error tracking when things break in production, analytics to understand what users do, AI integration if you're building anything modern, database setup with type-safe queries, and security headers properly configured.

Most boilerplates give you a folder structure and wish you luck.

Launcho gives you production-ready infrastructure.

Why Launcho's Foundation is Different

I didn't just throw popular packages together. Every tool was chosen because it solves a real problem I've hit building SaaS products, it's production-proven with no experimental nonsense, it integrates cleanly with the rest of the stack, and it has great developer experience.

The foundation comes first. Once you have solid infrastructure, you can experiment with everything, A/B test pricing, try different features, iterate on your product. But if your foundation is broken, nothing else matters.

Let's break down each piece.

1. Authentication: Better Auth

Authentication is the first thing users encounter. If signup is broken, you lose customers before they see your product.

Launcho comes with Better Auth fully configured for email/password authentication, OAuth providers like Google and GitHub, magic link login, email verification flows, password reset with secure tokens, session management, protected routes, and role-based access control.

Why Better Auth Over NextAuth?

I spent weeks debugging NextAuth v4's session handling. Better Auth just works. It has native Next.js 16 support built specifically for the App Router, better TypeScript with fully typed sessions and user objects, a simpler API without callback hell, it's faster because it's edge-compatible with no unnecessary redirects, and it's actively developed while NextAuth v5 is still stuck in beta.

Where You'll Use This

Every time a user signs up, logs in, or accesses protected content. You'll use it to protect server actions, secure API routes, implement role-based features, build multi-tenant applications, and even integrate enterprise SSO if you go that route.

The best part? You don't have to think about any of this. It's already set up and working.

2. Subscription Billing: Stripe

Stripe webhooks are where most founders fail. One missed webhook equals lost revenue or angry customers asking why they got charged but can't access your product.

Launcho includes the complete subscription checkout flow, webhook handlers that never fail with retries and a dead letter queue, customer portal integration so users can manage their own subscriptions, usage-based billing support, subscription management for upgrades and downgrades, proration handling, trial periods, and coupon codes.

Why This Matters

I've debugged Stripe webhooks at 2 AM more times than I can count. Launcho's webhook handler validates webhook signatures to prevent fake events, processes webhooks idempotently to handle duplicates, makes atomic database updates so you never have partial state, logs everything comprehensively to Sentry, and automatically retries with exponential backoff.

Real-World Scenarios

You'll use this for monthly and annual subscription plans, usage-based pricing like API calls or credits, team and seat-based billing, add-ons and upgrades, and converting free trials to paid subscriptions.

When a subscription is created, Launcho automatically updates your database and sends a welcome email. When it expires, it sends a notification. When payment fails, it handles the retry logic. You don't write any of this, it's already there.

3. AI Integration: Vercel AI SDK

If you're building a SaaS in 2025 without AI, you're already behind. But integrating AI properly is harder than it looks.

Launcho includes support for multiple AI providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Mistral, streaming responses for better user experience, token usage tracking so you know your costs, rate limiting per user or plan, prompt templates, context management, and comprehensive error handling with fallbacks.

Why Vercel AI SDK?

It's model-agnostic so you can switch providers without rewriting code. It has built-in streaming support so users see results as they generate instead of waiting. The React hooks make client-side integration trivial. It's edge runtime compatible for fast responses anywhere in the world. And it has built-in token counting so you can track costs and prevent abuse.

Where This Comes In

AI chatbots and assistants, content generation tools, code completion and analysis, image generation and editing, and data analysis with insights. The infrastructure is there, you just build your unique prompts and logic.

4. Type-Safe Database: Drizzle ORM

Your database schema is your application's foundation. If you break it, you break everything. That's why Launcho uses Drizzle ORM with full TypeScript support.

You get PostgreSQL setup through Vercel Postgres or Neon, complete schema definitions for users, subscriptions, and common SaaS tables, a type-safe query builder that catches errors at compile time, a migration system, database seeding for development, connection pooling, and edge runtime support.

Why Drizzle Over Prisma?

I love Prisma, but Drizzle is faster with no query engine overhead, has better TypeScript with inferred types instead of generated ones, produces smaller bundles which matters for serverless, uses SQL-like syntax that's easier for SQL developers, and it's edge compatible while Prisma isn't yet.

What This Means For You

Every database query is type-safe. If you try to access a field that doesn't exist, TypeScript catches it before you deploy. If you change your schema, TypeScript tells you everywhere that breaks. No more runtime database errors because you misspelled a column name.

You'll use this for user data management, subscription tracking, usage analytics, multi-tenant data isolation, and audit logs.

5. Transactional Emails: Resend

Email is how you communicate with customers. If emails don't send or land in spam, you lose money. Launcho uses Resend with pre-built React Email templates.

You get welcome emails, email verification, password reset, subscription confirmations, payment receipts, trial expiration warnings, usage limit notifications, and team invitations, all pre-configured and ready to customize.

Why Resend?

You write email templates in React JSX instead of fighting with HTML tables. The deliverability is excellent with optimized infrastructure. The API is simple without SendGrid's complexity. The developer experience is great with local preview and TypeScript support. And the free tier includes 100,000 emails per month.

Real-World Usage

Every user onboarding flow, transaction confirmation, security notification, and customer support email. You can even use it for marketing campaigns if you want. The templates are there, just customize the content and branding.

6. Error Tracking: Sentry

If you don't know your app is broken, you can't fix it. Sentry tells you immediately when something goes wrong, where it happened, and who it affected.

Launcho comes with automatic error capture for both client and server, source map upload so you see actual code not minified garbage, user context tracking, release tracking, performance monitoring, breadcrumb trails showing what led to the error, and alert notifications.

Why Sentry?

It catches everything including unhandled errors and promise rejections. You get rich context with user info, request data, and full stack traces. It has smart issue grouping so you don't get 1,000 alerts for the same bug. You get performance insights showing slow queries and N+1 problems. And the free tier includes 5,000 errors per month.

When This Saves You

Production bug monitoring so you know about issues before customers complain, performance bottleneck detection, tracking user experience issues, monitoring API errors, and investigating payment failures. Every error is logged with full context. You fix it before it becomes a bigger problem.

7. Product Analytics: PostHog

You can't improve what you don't measure. PostHog shows you what users actually do in your product.

Launcho includes event tracking, user identification, feature flags, A/B testing, session recordings, funnel analysis, retention cohorts, and custom dashboards, all in one platform.

Why PostHog?

It's an all-in-one platform combining analytics, feature flags, and A/B tests. It's privacy-friendly and GDPR compliant with a self-hostable option. There's no sampling so you analyze 100% of events. The data is real-time with no 24-hour delays. And the free tier includes 1 million events per month.

Where This Matters Most

Optimizing conversion funnels, tracking feature adoption, analyzing user retention, running A/B test experiments, predicting churn, and validating product-market fit.

The feature flags are particularly powerful. You can ship a new pricing page to 10% of users, measure conversion, then roll it out to everyone if it works better. Or kill it if it doesn't. All without deploying new code.

8. Additional Foundation Features

Beyond the core tools, Launcho includes automatic sitemap generation for all pages, OG metadata for social sharing, structured data for rich search results, canonical URLs to avoid duplicate content, and robots.txt configuration for SEO.

For security, you get CSP configured, CORS handling for API routes, rate limiting on sensitive endpoints, CSRF protection for forms, and secure cookie settings.

For developer experience, TypeScript strict mode catches errors early, ESLint and Prettier enforce consistent code style, Git hooks lint before commits, environment validation with Zod schemas ensures you never deploy with missing variables, and Docker setup provides local development parity.

The Foundation Philosophy

Here's the truth: your foundation is everything.

With solid infrastructure, you can A/B test your pricing without breaking payments, experiment with features knowing errors are tracked, iterate quickly because auth and billing just work, and scale confidently because the foundation holds.

But if your foundation is shaky, every experiment becomes risky. Every new feature might break something else. Every deploy is a gamble.

Launcho gives you the foundation first. Then you can build whatever you want on top.

Alternative Options: Flexibility When You Need It

The core foundation is battle-tested and works for 95% of SaaS products. But I know some founders have specific needs or preferences.

That's why Launcho supports alternatives for key components. You get the proven foundation by default, but you can swap in alternatives if needed.

Payment Processing Alternatives

Stripe is the default. It's the industry standard, most flexible, and best documented.

But you can use Lemon Squeezy instead. Lemon Squeezy is a Merchant of Record, which means they handle ALL international tax compliance automatically. You never think about VAT, GST, or sales tax again. The setup is faster because there's no tax configuration. The trade-off? Higher fees at 5% plus 50 cents per transaction versus Stripe's 2.9% plus 30 cents.

When should you use Lemon Squeezy? If you're a solo founder launching globally, you don't want to think about tax compliance, and you're okay paying more per transaction for simplicity. You save dozens of hours on tax setup but pay an extra 2% per transaction. For most new products, that's a good trade.

There's also Polar.sh for developer-first products. Polar is open-source, has lower fees at 4% plus fee, includes license key management, integrates with GitHub, and has built-in entitlements. Use it if you're building developer tools, APIs, or need license key management.

Database Alternatives

Drizzle ORM with Neon Postgres is the default. It's type-safe, fast, and edge-compatible.

But you can use Supabase instead. Supabase gives you Postgres plus auth, storage, and real-time subscriptions in one service. The free tier is generous with 500MB database and 50,000 monthly active users. It includes file uploads and WebSocket support out of the box. The trade-off is less control and potential vendor lock-in, though it's open-source so you can self-host.

When should you use Supabase? If you need real-time features like chat or collaboration, want file storage included, or prefer one service over multiple. It's faster to set up if you're brand new to backend development.

File Storage Options

Cloudflare R2 is the default because it has zero egress fees. S3 charges you every time someone downloads a file. For high-traffic files, R2 is 90% cheaper. It's S3-compatible so migration is easy if you need it later.

You might not need file storage at all if your app doesn't have uploads. But if you do, R2 is the best choice for profile pictures, document uploads, AI-generated images, or serving media at scale.

Analytics Alternatives

PostHog is the default because it combines analytics, feature flags, and A/B testing in one platform.

But you can use Plausible instead. Plausible is privacy-first and GDPR-compliant by default, so you don't need cookie banners. The script is lightweight at under 1KB versus PostHog's 15KB. It's perfect for EU customers who care about privacy. The trade-off? No feature flags, no session recordings, and no advanced features. Just clean, simple analytics.

When should you use Plausible? If you have European customers, want minimal script size for performance, or don't need advanced features like A/B testing.

Background Jobs Options

Upstash QStash is the default because it's serverless and built for Vercel. It's just HTTP endpoints with no worker processes to manage. The free tier includes 500 messages per day.

But you can use Inngest for complex workflows. Inngest handles multi-step workflows with branching logic, has a visual debugger so you see execution in real-time, and it's durable so it survives server restarts. The trade-off is more complex setup.

When should you use Inngest? If you have multi-step onboarding flows, need delays and automatic retries, or want visibility into workflow execution. For example, send welcome email immediately, wait 3 days, send tips email, wait 7 days, send upgrade prompt.

Customer Support Options

Crisp is the default because the free tier includes 2 users with unlimited conversations. You get live chat, email support, and a knowledge base in one tool.

But you can use Plain for developer-first support. Plain is API-first and embeddable, designed for technical products. You can create tickets programmatically and integrate support directly into your app instead of using a popup widget.

When should you use Plain? If you want support integrated into your app UI, need programmatic ticket creation, or don't want a traditional chat widget.

How to Choose Alternatives

Here's my honest advice.

Start with the defaults. The core foundation is proven. It works. Don't overthink it.

Swap alternatives when you have a specific pain point the default doesn't solve, you're willing to accept the trade-offs like higher cost or less control, and you've already launched and validated your product.

Don't swap because it looks cooler, you want to try new tech, or someone on Twitter recommended it. Most indie hackers who switch tools early waste weeks on setup that doesn't increase revenue.

Ship with the defaults. Make money. Then optimize.

Pricing & Early Access

Launcho is launching in Q1 2025 with a one-time purchase model. No subscriptions. You buy it once and use it forever.

Launch Price: $299 for lifetime access
Early Adopter Price: $149 for people who join the waitlist

This discount is only available during the pre-launch period. Once Launcho officially launches with all features complete, comprehensive documentation, and proven success stories from the first batch of customers, the price goes up to $299 and eventually $399.

The discount ends when we launch. I'll announce the launch date at least 2 weeks in advance so you have time, but if you're serious about shipping fast, lock in the early adopter price now.

What You Get

The complete Next.js 16 boilerplate with all core features, all alternative integrations like Lemon Squeezy and Supabase, comprehensive documentation covering setup, deployment, and customization, code examples for common patterns, 90 days of email support with direct access to me, private Discord community to network with other founders, and lifetime updates to version 1 including all improvements, fixes, and new features.

Major version upgrades like v2 or v3 may require a new purchase, but you'll get a discount as an existing customer.

Getting Started with Launcho

When you buy Launcho, you clone the repo, run the setup script, and start developing. The setup takes about 30 minutes.

The setup script validates all your environment variables, creates database tables, seeds initial data, tests all integrations, and generates type definitions.

Then you spend the next week building your core feature. Not debugging auth. Not fixing Stripe webhooks. Not figuring out why emails land in spam. Just building the thing that makes your product unique.

After a week, you deploy to Vercel and everything just works. Auth flows working. Payments processing. Emails delivering. Errors tracking. Analytics flowing.

What You're NOT Paying For

Let's be clear about what Launcho doesn't include.

No UI component library because shadcn/ui and Magic UI are free and better. No pre-built admin dashboard because your admin needs are unique. No marketing site templates because your positioning is unique. No blog or CMS system because separate tools like Ghost work better. No design system because you should design for your brand.

Launcho is infrastructure, not features. You still need to build your unique product. But you'll build it 10 times faster because the boring stuff is done.

Building in Public

I'm documenting the entire build process here on the blog. Every week I'm sharing technical decisions and trade-offs, implementation details and lessons learned, code patterns from real SaaS products, and performance optimizations.

Upcoming posts:

Week 1: Authentication system deep dive comparing Better Auth, NextAuth, and Clerk
Week 2: Building a Stripe webhook handler that never fails
Week 3: AI streaming with rate limiting and token tracking
Week 4: Integrating payment alternatives like Lemon Squeezy and Polar
Week 5: Production deployment checklist and common gotchas

Follow along on Twitter, LinkedIn, or subscribe to the blog below.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I use Launcho for client projects?
Yes. One purchase equals unlimited projects. Build for yourself or clients with no royalties or restrictions.

Do I need to know Next.js 16?
Basic Next.js knowledge helps but the code is heavily documented. If you've built with React, you'll be fine. The setup wizard handles most complexity.

Can I swap out the default tools?
Yes, everything is modular. But I recommend starting with the defaults, they're chosen for a reason. Swap alternatives once you've launched and know what you actually need.

Is this better than other boilerplates?
I built Launcho because existing boilerplates are too basic with just a folder structure, too bloated with 50 features you'll never use, or too opinionated forcing design decisions on you. Launcho gives you production-ready infrastructure with the flexibility to customize when needed.

Do you offer refunds?
30-day money-back guarantee with no questions asked and no hassle.

Will I get updates?
Yes. Lifetime updates to v1 are included. All bug fixes, improvements, and new features added to version 1 are free. Major version upgrades may require a new purchase but you'll get a discount.

When exactly does the early adopter discount end?
The $149 price is locked until official launch. I'll announce the launch date at least 2 weeks in advance. Get on the waitlist to be notified before the price goes up.

Final Thoughts

I've wasted hundreds of hours on infrastructure that should just work.

Launcho is the boilerplate I wish existed when I started building SaaS products. No fluff, no unnecessary features. Just solid, production-ready infrastructure that lets you focus on building features customers pay for.

The foundation comes first. Everything else is optional.

With Launcho you can A/B test anything once you launch, experiment with features knowing errors are tracked, iterate quickly because payments and auth work, and swap alternatives when you need them.

If you're tired of rebuilding auth flows, debugging Stripe webhooks at 2 AM, setting up error tracking from scratch, or wasting weeks on infrastructure instead of building features, join the waitlist and lock in the $149 early adopter price before it increases to $299.

Or email me at raman@launcho.dev with questions. I read every message.

Got feedback? Tell me what else you'd want in a boilerplate, which alternatives you'd actually use and why, or what problems you're stuck on with your current stack.

Next week: Deep dive into the Better Auth implementation, why I chose it over NextAuth and Clerk, how session management works, OAuth provider setup, and the edge cases that break most auth systems.