Hype Stack vs TurboStarter

TurboStarter is the kit this page respects most, because it made the multi-platform argument before we did. Bart Zagrodzki ships a Next.js web app, an Expo mobile app, and a WXT browser extension from one Turborepo, on a Hono API with Drizzle and Postgres, and he ships his own apps on it. Auth runs on Better Auth. Billing covers Stripe, Lemon Squeezy, Polar, Dodo Payments, RevenueCat, and Superwall, which matters once mobile subscriptions enter the picture. Organizations, i18n, emails, an admin panel, analytics, a CMS, storage, and an AI kit are in the box. It is a lot of software for a lifetime licence.

If you are searching for a turbostarter alternative, the useful comparison is not "which one has more features". It is what each kit assumes about how you will work in it for the next two years. TurboStarter assumes you will clone everything and remove what you do not need. Hype Stack assumes you will start from an empty MIT template and ask a CLI for features one at a time.

What both ship

Start with the overlap, because it is large and it narrows the shortlist to these two for anyone who needs mobile and an extension from the same repository.

Both use Hono for the API, both use Better Auth, both run on Postgres. Both leave you owning the source with no runtime dependency on the vendor. The five tiles that match are the reason the rest of this page can be about delivery and tooling rather than about who has a mobile app.

Where they differ

TurboStarter

How features arrive

Every feature is in the clone. You remove the CMS, the analytics, and the billing providers you will not use.

The template is empty. The CLI writes the packs you name into it and merges their Prisma models into your schema.

Web framework

Next.js. The larger ecosystem, and the one more people already know.

React 19 with TanStack Router: typed routes, typed params, loaders that are plain functions.

Database layer

Drizzle on Postgres.

Prisma for the schema and migrations, Kysely for queries. Two tools, each doing the thing it is good at.

Toolchain

Turborepo with the standard Next.js build, lint, and typecheck.

Nx with oxlint, oxfmt, Vite 8 on Rolldown, and the native TypeScript compiler. Lint in seconds, not minutes.

Requests

The kit's own API client over the Hono routes.

HyperFetch, BetterTyped's open-source client, typing every route from the Hono definition into web, mobile, and extension.

Price

Core Kit listed at $249 and the bundle at $399 at the time of writing. Lifetime licence, lifetime updates.

Template and five packs free under MIT. Paid catalog $299 a year for one seat, $1,399 a year unlimited. Code stays after the year.

Browse the pack catalog

The price row goes to TurboStarter for a single developer who buys once and never wants another feature. It goes the other way for a team that installs three packs in month one, stops paying, and keeps the code, or for anyone who starts on the free template and finds the five free packs cover the product. Neither reading is wrong. Do the sum for the product you are actually building.

Compose, in practice

"Compose instead of clone" is easy to say and worth showing. Three things change when features are written in on request rather than removed after the fact.

The cost of that model is honest to name. Composing needs a CLI, a registry, and codemods that touch your routes and navigation, which is machinery TurboStarter does not need. When a codemod meets a file you have heavily edited, you read a diff. A cloned kit has no such step, because there is nothing to compose.

What sits under the DX

Both kits are TypeScript monorepos. The layers below are Hype Stack's, with the parts that come from BetterTyped marked, since that is the honest way to say "we control the request layer and the tooling" without pretending the rest is ours too.

TurboStarter's equivalent stack is Next.js, Drizzle, Turborepo, and Cloudflare, which is a perfectly good set of choices with a larger hiring pool behind the web framework. The difference that shows up daily is lint and typecheck speed, and the difference that shows up quarterly is whether your request layer is a kit-internal client or a published library with its own release cycle and docs.

Which one fits you

Below is the multi-surface stack this page recommends: the Better Auth starter, the native app shell layout that carries the web app into Electron, Stripe billing, and real-time notifications that push to web and mobile alike.