Why We Built Start Labs

Every time we started a new project, we rebuilt the same infrastructure. Auth. Payments. Notifications. Search. File uploads. Feature flags. It took weeks before we could write a single line of business logic. We built Start Labs to make that stop.

The problem: infrastructure on repeat

We've built 15+ production apps across SaaS, marketplaces, mobile, and internal tools. Every single one needed the same core infrastructure: user authentication with OAuth, subscription billing through Stripe, email notifications, full-text search, file storage, and audit logging. Each time, we'd spend 3-6 weeks just wiring up the foundation before anyone could build the actual product.

The existing solutions didn't solve our problem. Firebase locks you into Google's ecosystem with proprietary APIs that don't compose. Supabase gives you a database and auth, but you're on your own for payments, search, and everything else. And the new wave of AI code generators like Lovable and Bolt produce throwaway code that works in demos but falls apart when you need to maintain it, extend it, or audit it for compliance.

What Start Labs actually is

Start Labs is a collection of composable, open-source infrastructure modules published to npm. Each module handles one concern well: @startlabs/auth for authentication, @startlabs/payments for Stripe billing, @startlabs/search for full-text search, and so on. You install the modules you need, register them with a single function call, and they wire themselves together.

There are three layers to every module. A pure core with zero framework dependencies: just business logic, inputs, and outputs. An adapter layer that maps HTTP requests to the core functions (Fastify is the primary adapter). And a Drizzle schema with its own Postgres schema namespace, so modules never collide with your application tables.

On top of the infrastructure modules, we built domain modules for common application patterns: marketplace, booking, content management, e-commerce, learning, community, and more. And we packaged 12 production-ready templates that combine infrastructure and domain modules into working applications you can clone and deploy in minutes.

How it works

Three steps. Pick a template that matches your product. Install the additional modules you need. Deploy.

# Create a new marketplace app
npx create-startlabs my-app --template marketplace

# Start development
cd my-app && docker compose up -d && pnpm dev

# You now have auth, payments, search, and messaging working

That's not a prototype. That's a production app with real authentication, real Stripe billing, real full-text search, and real-time messaging. You can sign up, create listings, make purchases, and send messages within the first 5 minutes.

Why not AI code generators?

AI code generators like Lovable and Bolt are impressive demos. You describe what you want, and they generate a working UI in seconds. But there's a fundamental problem: they generate code, not architecture.

Generated code doesn't compose. When you need to add a feature that wasn't in the original prompt, you re-generate or manually patch. When you need to upgrade a dependency, there's no migration path. When you need to audit for security or compliance, there's no structured schema to inspect. The code is a snapshot, not a system.

Start Labs takes the opposite approach. Every module is a tested, versioned, composable building block. You can upgrade individual modules with npm update. You can inspect every schema and every route. You can swap one module for another without rewriting your application. The modules are the architecture, not just the initial scaffolding.

Open source, paid hosting

Every module is MIT-licensed and free to use. Install them from npm, self-host on your own infrastructure, and you never pay us a cent. This is the same model as Supabase: the code is free, the hosting is paid. If you want us to run your auth, payments, search, and everything else on managed infrastructure with zero DevOps, that's where the paid tiers come in.

What's next

We're shipping new modules and templates every week. The CLI is getting smarter. The documentation is growing. We're building a developer dashboard for managing your modules and API keys. And we're working on hosted services so you can deploy a full Start Labs application to a URL in one click.

If you've ever spent weeks rebuilding authentication for the fourth time, Start Labs is for you. Clone a template, activate your modules, and start building the part of your product that actually matters.