Question 1

What's included in the Shell SaaS starter?

Accepted Answer

The full source of a working application with nothing in it. You buy it once, point it at your own Supabase project, and build the product instead of the plumbing. There is no hosted service and no subscription.

Question 2

How is this different from other Next.js SaaS boilerplates?

Accepted Answer

Most of them ship a schema — a profiles table, an organisations model, a billing integration — for a product you have not designed yet, so the first thing you do is delete code. Shell ships the frame and stops: the chrome, auth and the design system, with supabase/migrations/ empty. A bare framework template leaves the database empty too, but it leaves you to build the rest. The objection you will hear is that agents are good at extending a structure and bad at designing one. That is true of an agent handed a blank repo and a prompt. /kickoff is not a prompt — it is an interview: it draws the model out of you, writes it to docs/BRIEF.md, and confirms a plan before writing any SQL. The structure gets designed in the conversation, then built.

Question 3

Why “Shells”, plural?

Accepted Answer

Shells is the line. The one that exists today is Shell — the SaaS shell, for Next.js and Supabase. More are planned for other kinds of application and other stacks. Buying today gets you Shell; anything else in the line is not built yet and is not part of this purchase.

Question 4

Do I need a Supabase project to run it?

Accepted Answer

No. Run npm install && npm run dev and the full shell renders immediately against placeholder data. Nothing crashes and no page is blank. Connecting a real project is a later step, not a prerequisite.

Question 5

Is it really zero database tables?

Accepted Answer

Really. supabase/migrations/ is empty, there is no profiles table, and no notion of teams, groups or roles exists anywhere in the code. The app runs on Supabase Auth alone. Whether users belong to organisations, whether there is a profile row, how someone gets access to shared data — those are product decisions, and a starter that guesses them hands you something to undo.

Question 6

Is there a sign-up page?

Accepted Answer

No, and this is worth knowing before you buy. Sign in, sign out, request a password reset, set a new password, and the OAuth and magic-link callback are all built and working. Registration is not — you create your first users in Supabase Studio. Self-serve signup, invite-only, and admin-provisioned are three different products, and the one you pick changes the screen, so the template does not pick for you.

Question 7

Do I need the Supabase secret key?

Accepted Answer

No. Nothing in the shell requires it — every path runs on the caller's own token and lets Row Level Security decide, so it deploys with no elevated key at all. If you later need a genuine RLS bypass for a scheduled job or a data pipeline, tryCreateAdminClient() returns null when no secret key is set, so the caller has to handle its absence rather than assume it.

Question 8

What does /kickoff actually do?

Accepted Answer

It is a Claude Code skill that ships with the template. It opens a conversation about what you are building — the job it does, what it keeps track of, who can see what — writes the result to docs/BRIEF.md, and turns that brief into a first wave of real work: schema and policies, navigation, and a screen you can click. It confirms a plan before writing anything.

Question 9

Does it work with Cursor as well as Claude Code?

Accepted Answer

Yes. The same skills are mirrored into .agents/skills/, so Cursor reads them too, and there are MCP configs for both. AGENTS.md sits alongside CLAUDE.md so neither agent is a second-class citizen. Underneath it is a normal Next.js app — you can ignore all of it and build by hand.

Question 10

What is deliberately not included?

Accepted Answer

Billing, transactional email, a sign-up screen, teams and roles, invitations, analytics, file uploads, in-product AI, MFA, i18n, dark mode, and a test suite. These are the parts that are specific to your product, and a guess at them is worth less than nothing — it is code you delete before you can start. Shell ships the parts every SaaS needs and stops there.

Question 11

What licence does the Shell SaaS starter use?

Accepted Answer

A custom commercial licence. The full source, yours to modify and ship, on as many projects as you like — including client work and commercial products, in source or compiled form, with no attribution and no royalties. The one restriction: you may not resell or redistribute the template itself as a starting point for other people.

Question 12

Why is there no dark mode?

Accepted Answer

Because a half-applied dark theme is worse than none. Shell sets color-scheme: light and never applies the dark class, so an OS dark preference cannot partially style an undesigned theme. Adding one is a deliberate design pass, not a toggle.

A working SaaS app with nothing in it.

From checkout to your first screen

What’s built

Before you build

Start with the shell already built.