Introduction — ShipKit

ShipKit is a SaaS starter: a working application with sign-in, payments, credits, an admin console, email, i18n and a marketing site, running on TanStack Start and Cloudflare Workers. You clone it, rename it, delete what you do not need and build your product in the space that is left.

It is written around one rule: every optional feature must be deletable in minutes. Each module lives in its own folder, touches shared files only in marked places, and ships with a deletion recipe that CI runs on every pull request to prove the app still builds without it. The second design goal is that a coding agent can work in the repo without breaking it: the conventions are written down in CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md, and the important ones are enforced by tests rather than trusted.

What you get

Area	What ships
Sign-in	Passwordless, through better-auth: Google (with One Tap), GitHub when configured, and a six-digit code emailed to any address. No passwords, so no reset flow
Payments	Stripe and Creem behind one provider-neutral event layer: subscriptions, one-time credit packs, checkout, customer portal, refunds. Stripe is the default
Credits	A ledger with monthly grants per plan, purchasable packs, overdraft-proof spending and admin adjustments
Admin console	`/admin`, in five sections: overview (KPIs and charts), people (users, waitlist, feedback), revenue (subscriptions, orders, credits, affiliates), developers (API keys, audit log, email log) and settings (operator settings, roles, email previews)
Permissions	Role-based access with wildcard grants. Each feature declares its permissions; the same grant gates the page, the server function and the API
API	Read-only JSON APIs with two kinds of API key: `/api/v1/admin/` for your own analysis, `/api/v1/me/` for a customer's own data
Email and notifications	Transactional email through Resend, localized per recipient, with a delivery log; an in-app notification bell
Files	Uploads to R2, streamed through the Worker; profile photos
i18n	English and Chinese through Paraglide, English unprefixed and `/zh/...` for Chinese
Content	MDX blog, docs and legal pages (terms, privacy, refunds, DMCA), compiled at build time
Marketing site	A landing page assembled from a config array of blocks, a pricing page, four visual themes with light and dark modes
More modules	Audit log, feedback, waitlist, affiliate program, PostHog analytics, and a public demo mode
Account self-service	Profile, language, data export as JSON, and account deletion with a retention window

Each of these has its own page under Features in the sidebar.

The stack, and why

Layer	Choice	Why
Framework	TanStack Start + TanStack Router and Query	Type-safe file routes, server functions and loaders in one React app, built on Vite
Runtime	Cloudflare Workers	One deploy target at the edge; the dev server runs your code in workerd, the same runtime as production
Database	Cloudflare D1 (SQLite) + Drizzle	A binding, not a connection string: no pool, no credentials, local and remote behave the same
Storage	Cloudflare R2	Also a binding, so uploads need no S3 keys or presigned URLs
Auth	better-auth	Sessions and OAuth in your own database, with plugins for One Tap, emailed codes, admin and API keys
Payments	Stripe or Creem	Both wired; `PAYMENT_PROVIDER` picks which takes new checkouts. See Payments
i18n	Paraglide	Messages compile to tree-shakable functions; no runtime catalog
Content	MDX via `@mdx-js/rollup`	Compiled to ES modules at build time, because workerd forbids the runtime evaluation most MDX layers rely on
UI	shadcn/ui + Tailwind CSS v4	Components you own and edit, styled with tokens
Tooling	bun, Biome, Vitest, Playwright	One package manager, one linter and formatter, unit and end-to-end tests

A few limitations come with these choices, and it is better to know them up front:

TanStack Start is still a v1 release candidate. Versions are pinned exactly; read the changelog before you bump them.
D1 has no interactive transactions. Multi-step writes use a single conditional statement or db.batch(), as described in Database.
The template targets Cloudflare only. Moving to another host means replacing the bindings layer, not changing a setting.
In-app plan changes, failed-renewal handling and provider-side customer redaction are Stripe only.

How the repository is laid out

src/
├── routes/      # thin route files: guards and composition
│   ├── _marketing/   # public pages, prerendered at build
│   ├── _auth/        # login
│   ├── _app/         # signed-in shell: dashboard, billing, credits,
│   │                 #   files, settings and the /admin console
│   └── api/          # auth, webhooks, file streams, the /api/v1 APIs
├── features/    # vertical slices: auth, billing, credits, files, ...
├── core/        # shared kernel: db, server, payment, email, authz, ...
├── config/      # app-config, plans, landing page, themes
└── components/  # shared UI, the sidebar, marketing blocks
content/         # blog, docs and legal pages as MDX
messages/        # UI copy, en.json and zh.json
drizzle/         # SQL migrations
scripts/         # seed, deletion recipes, sitemap, marketing captures

A feature folder such as src/features/credits/ holds its own schema, server functions, components and queries. It reaches the rest of the app through small registries in src/core/, one import line per feature, so removing a feature means deleting its folder and a handful of marked lines. Architecture explains how the pieces connect.

Every read and write from the UI follows the same path: route loader, then TanStack Query, then a server function, then Drizzle. API routes are kept for external callers: auth, webhooks, file streams and the /api/v1 APIs. Server functions covers the details.

Where to go next

Getting started: run the app locally and make yourself an admin.
Working with AI agents: the skills and guard-rail tests, if you build with Claude Code, Codex or Cursor.
Configuration: the config files, environment variables and admin-editable settings.
Deploy: put it on Cloudflare.
Deleting features: strip the modules you do not need before you start building.