ShipFast and the world of starter kits
What is the value of a starter kit for builders?
ShipFast vulnerabilities
A number of vulnerabilities have been discovered in ShipFast (more here). I do not recommend that you buy ShipFast at this time.
I’m really curious about the target market for products like ShipFast.
The core marketing for any of these frameworks is “I’ll help you build quickly”.
The thing that gets missed with all of them is that you have to be a pretty skilled programmer as soon as you go off the beaten path.
I’m working on a JavaScript-based MVP right now around real estate + AI, so I bought ShipFast because I wanted to have all of the auth/payments stuff done for me. But I pretty quickly found myself going into the internals and drastically altering some of the core decisions in the codebase — what mailers to use, how auth works, etc.
Because I only paid $200ish for it, that’s not a big deal. But some of these frameworks are more than $1000! That would hurt a bit more.
It’s an interesting idea, and there’s a ton of space for this stuff on the web. But if you aren’t an expert-level JS dev, it may be more frustrating than just starting from scratch.