Both Hype Stack SaaS starters, Better Auth and WorkOS, are free from today. Organizations, roles, invitations and the admin app included. Why I made the change, what's still paid, and what happens to the old auth starter.
From today, both SaaS starters are free. That's starter-saas-betterauth and starter-saas-workos, the full versions,
with nothing cut out. No license, no trial, no catch in the small print. You still need a free account to install packs,
same as before.
The free auth starter that shipped in 1.9 is gone, because nobody needs a cut-down copy of something that's now free.
This isn't a promotion with an end date. It's how Hype Stack is priced from here on: the starter is part of the foundation, and the foundation doesn't cost anything.
What you get for free
Each starter is a whole multi-tenant app on top of the MIT template:
- Email and password sign-in, Google sign-in, password reset and email verification
- Organizations you can create and switch between, with invitations by email
- Roles and permissions, checked on the backend with
hasAccess - An onboarding flow for people who don't belong to an organization yet
- Per-organization feature flags, with overrides in the admin app
- Settings pages for the profile and the organization, which other packs add tabs to
- The admin app: users, organizations, a dashboard, and admin management
- Sign-in, the organization switcher and settings on mobile and in the browser extension
The Better Auth one runs on your own Postgres, so there's no extra account to create. The WorkOS one is for when a customer asks for SSO before they sign the contract.
Add the free basic layout, teams and projects, and you have a product with accounts, organizations, a dashboard shell and real data in it. That's six free packs out of twenty, plus the template and the CLI.
npx @hype-stack/cli create my-app
npx @hype-stack/cli compose --packs starter-saas-betterauth,layout-basicWhy the starters shouldn't be paid
Every project needs exactly one starter. Nothing else in the catalog installs without one, because billing, notifications, bookings and the rest all read the organization off the request. So a paid starter meant paying before you'd built anything, for the one piece you had no way around.
That's the wrong moment to ask for money. At that point you don't know yet whether the project will go anywhere, or whether Hype Stack fits the way you work. You find that out a few weeks in, once you've added features, broken something and fixed it, and seen how the packs fit together. I'd rather you get there first.
The free auth starter in 1.9 was my first attempt at fixing this, and it was a half-fix. It was the Better Auth starter with organizations, onboarding, invitations and most of the admin app taken out, plus a hidden personal workspace so the paid packs would still work on it. Three starters to keep in step, and the smallest one was the one nobody would pick once they'd seen the full one. It also meant the free path started with an app you'd outgrow the day your second user wanted to invite a colleague.
What's still paid
The things that take weeks to build well, and that you add when your product actually needs them:
- Billing, on Stripe, Lemon Squeezy or Polar
- Notifications, AI chat, bookings, CRM, calendar, whiteboard and the newsletter
- The layouts past the basic one
- The templates, which put several packs together into a finished app
Packs and templates you buy are lifetime licenses: one payment, no expiry. All-Access stays yearly. Sales of these are what keep the template maintained, so the free part isn't going anywhere either.
The rule I'm working to from now on is simple. What every project needs before its first feature is free. What you'd otherwise spend a month on is what you pay for.
If you installed the old auth starter
Your project keeps working. The files are in your repository and they're yours, so nothing changes until you change it.
The catch is upgrades. The CLI no longer knows starter-auth-betterauth, so it can't plan the swap to a SaaS starter
for you the way it would for a community starter. Moving over is a manual reinstall. If you're in that spot,
open an issue and I'll help you through it.
Try it
If the price of getting started is what stopped you before, it's gone. Start a project, pick a starter, and open the packs when you need the next thing.