Open SaaS 0.24 by Wasp: solo-founder curator review of the free SaaS starter (2026)

Quick answer (June 20, 2026): Open SaaS by Wasp (latest release OpenSaaS for Wasp 0.24, shipped June 11, 2026, 14.7k GitHub stars, MIT licensed) is the most batteries-included free SaaS starter on the open-source shelf right now. Auth, payments, file uploads, email, a docs site, AI-assist plugin packs, all behind a single declarative .wasp file. The catch is the .wasp file itself. You get a real ship-ready product the same afternoon you clone it, and you sign up for a small but real portability bet by month nine. This curator review walks through the three exhibit paths a solo founder actually has in 2026.

The curator inbox this week kept asking the same thing in a different costume: I have one weekend, I want a real SaaS by Sunday night, what do I clone? For the gallery entry of June 20, 2026, the pick is

Open SaaS, the free, open-source starter built on top of the

Wasp full-stack framework. We picked it because of all the free templates we tested this month, it is the only one where a solo founder can credibly say I shipped, billing included, in a weekend without it being a lie.

What is Open SaaS, in one paragraph

Open SaaS is a 100 percent free, MIT-licensed, batteries-included SaaS starter kit, built on top of the Wasp full-stack framework. The runtime stack is familiar:

React on the front,

Node.js on the back,

Prisma talking to

PostgreSQL,

shadcn/ui components for the look,

Astro for the docs site, and

Playwright for the tests. What makes it different from a vanilla React plus Node monorepo is the main.wasp file at the root, which is where Wasp asks you to declare auth, routes, jobs and APIs once and then generates the integration glue for you. The latest stable release as of June 19, 2026 is OpenSaaS for Wasp 0.24, published June 11, 2026 on the Open SaaS GitHub repo.

What ships in the box, June 2026

A fresh scaffold (npx wasp new -t saas via opensaas.sh) gives you a working product, not a hello-world demo. Here is what is on the bench:

Every cell in that table is something a solo founder would otherwise have to wire up by hand or pay a paid boilerplate for. The community-curated AI assist plugins are the newest addition: opinionated prompts and rules so

Claude Code or Cursor write the Wasp-flavoured code with the right idioms instead of guessing.

The three exhibit paths a solo founder actually has

We score every ShipGarden exhibit on the same three paths. Last week's Mastra AI starter gallery entry framed them as deploy paths. For a SaaS boilerplate like Open SaaS, the same three paths are better described as founder commitment levels, because the real question is not where do I host this, it is how much of the original template will still be there in nine months.

Path A: Ship-as-is, rebrand-and-launch

You clone, change colours, change copy, drop in your Stripe price IDs, paste in your

Anthropic or OpenAI key, deploy to Fly or Railway, and ship. Total time, somewhere between a long Saturday and a long weekend. The maintenance promise is that your dependencies are upstream's problem and you just merge their releases.

This is the path most weekend builders take. It is also the path the project's own retrospective leans into, and the path the Dev.to write-up From 0 to 10K (April 2025) celebrates. If your validation question is is anyone willing to pay for this, Path A is almost certainly the right answer, because by the time you have an answer you may also have learned the product needs to change shape entirely.

Path B: Replace the Wasp-managed pieces

You keep the Wasp scaffold but slowly replace the pieces you have an opinion on. Maybe your auth stack is Clerk or your own session model. Maybe your payments are LemonSqueezy because of EU VAT and not Stripe. Maybe your AI assistant runs against your own

Anthropic gateway instead of the template default. Wasp does not stop you, you just have to write the integration code yourself and update main.wasp when the surface area changes.

This is where Open SaaS earns its keep for a founder who has shipped before. You get the speed of a batteries-included scaffold for the parts you do not care about (admin dashboard, password reset emails, blog) and full control over the parts you do.

Path C: Escape the Wasp DSL entirely

You clone Open SaaS for the reference architecture, then port the parts you need into a vanilla

Next.js project. You keep the Prisma schema, you keep the shadcn/ui design system, you keep the test suite. You leave Wasp behind.

This is the most honest path for a founder who is allergic to DSLs, has been bitten by abstractions that changed in ways they did not want, or expects to hire engineers who have never heard of Wasp. It costs you most of the speed advantage. You are essentially using Open SaaS as a tour of how a SaaS template should be structured, not as your runtime.

The question Open SaaS quietly asks you in month nine

Most reviews of Open SaaS stop at the feature list. The information none of them give you is the one that matters in month nine: how much of your codebase is Wasp-specific, and how confident are you that you want it to stay Wasp-specific?

Wasp is a real DSL with its own compiler. That is not a slur, it is the trade. In exchange for declaring your auth, routes, jobs and APIs once in main.wasp, you get the integration code for free. The bet you are making is that, two years from now, Wasp is still a project you want to be on. We think it is a reasonable bet today: the framework hit 14.7k stars across the template and shipped 0.24 nine days before this review went up, which is a healthy cadence. The maintainers also recently crossed an inflection point worth quoting: in a thread last month called You'd think AI would kill boilerplates. It's doing the opposite, the Open SaaS maintainer wrote, I created and maintain an open-source SaaS boilerplate. It just crossed 14k GitHub stars, which is crazy and unexpected (see the r/webdev thread). The point of the thread, and the reason it landed with operators, is that AI-assisted coding has not flattened boilerplate demand the way the consensus expected. It increased it, because a good template plus an AI agent ships a real product faster than a blank page plus an AI agent.

Translated to founder math: if you believe the Wasp project keeps shipping and your AI assistant keeps getting better at writing Wasp idioms, Path A is undervalued and you should take it. If you want the speed today but want to be able to walk away with a clean Next.js codebase later, Path B is the durable answer. Path C is the right answer for exactly one kind of founder: the one who already knows their tech stack cold and just wants the template's homework.

When Open SaaS is not the right pick

We try to write the honest version of every gallery entry, including when the exhibit is not for you. Open SaaS is the wrong starter if:

• You do not write TypeScript or JavaScript day to day. The Wasp DSL is JavaScript-flavoured. If you live in Python or Go, this is not the boilerplate for you.
• You want to learn how all the wiring works by reading vanilla code line by line. Wasp does some of the wiring for you, which is the point. If your reason for cloning a boilerplate is to study one, vanilla starter kits are a better classroom.
• You expect to hire a team of senior engineers in the next six months and Wasp would be a hard sell to all of them. Path C, the escape hatch, is real but it deletes most of the value.
• You want a paid template with a Discord full of paying customers and a guaranteed support window.

  

  ShipFast (paid alternative) at around 199 dollars is the obvious comparison; it is the boilerplate Open SaaS is positioned against on Reddit, and a real fit for some founders.

Where the Totalum platform sits in this picture

For completeness, since we keep getting the question:

the Totalum platform is on a different axis from Open SaaS. Open SaaS gives you batteries if you commit to the Wasp DSL. Totalum is an AI app builder that gives you batteries (auth, payments, database, file storage, custom domain, API and MCP surface) without a custom DSL: it emits real, owned

Next.js code you can keep deploying long after you stop paying. Both are honest pictures of a 2026 SaaS scaffold; the trade-off is the same as everywhere else in this gallery. Open SaaS is free and asks you to bet on Wasp. Totalum is paid and asks you to bet on a hosted builder that does not lock you in. If learning full-stack from scratch by reading a single main.wasp file is the goal, Open SaaS is an excellent teacher and the price is right.

Gallery score, June 20, 2026

ShipGarden scores every exhibit across the same five axes. Open SaaS lands here:

If you want a tour of where the AI agent side of the gallery sits this season,

AgentNotebook walks through this in a first-agent tutorial that pairs nicely with Open SaaS' AI plugin packs. The two together are basically the 2026 starter pack for an indie founder shipping a small AI SaaS this quarter, see also our running 2026 indie-SaaS stack curator note.

Frequently asked questions

Is Open SaaS actually free?

Yes. The repo is MIT licensed and the project's own site is opensaas.sh. The only thing you pay for is the SaaS infrastructure underneath: your database host, your domain, Stripe fees, your AI API calls.

What is the difference between Open SaaS and Wasp?

Wasp is the full-stack framework (with the .wasp DSL). Open SaaS is the SaaS-flavoured starter template built on top of Wasp. Think of Open SaaS as the most opinionated and most batteries-included Wasp template the maintainers ship.

Can I use Next.js with Open SaaS?

Not directly. Wasp's runtime uses React on the front (Vite under the hood, not Next.js) and Node on the back. Path C in this review covers the realistic port the ideas to Next.js route, but you will lose the Wasp-generated glue.

How does Open SaaS compare to ShipFast?

ShipFast is a paid Next.js boilerplate sold at around 199 dollars (as of June 2026). Open SaaS is free, MIT, and Wasp-flavoured. ShipFast has a more polished landing site and a paying Discord. Open SaaS has a healthier OSS contributor graph. Pick on which trade-off matters more to your launch.

Which payment processor should I pick in the template?

Default to Stripe if you sell mostly into the US. Default to Lemon Squeezy or Polar.sh if you sell internationally and want a merchant of record to handle VAT. Open SaaS supports all three, the swap is a config decision, not a rewrite.

Does the AI plugin pack only work with Claude Code and Cursor?

No. The 0.24 release also ships rules for OpenCode and OpenAI Codex, with community contributions adding more. The plugin packs are essentially shared prompts and project rules, so any AI coding assistant that reads .cursorrules-style files benefits.

What is the catch?

The Wasp DSL. You are betting on the Wasp project, the same way picking Rails in 2008 meant betting on Rails. We think the bet looks healthy in 2026; you should still write it down as a bet, not a free lunch.

Your move

Your move: clone wasp-lang/open-saas tonight, hold yourself to Path A for the first week, and only step into Path B if a real customer signals they want something the scaffold cannot give them yet. Curation is mostly about not changing the thing you cloned until the customer asks you to.