---
title: 'Building Laravel Saas: Part 1/5 - Choosing Starter Kit'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=_P6JFXqbYhA'
video_id: '_P6JFXqbYhA'
date: 2026-07-28
duration_sec: 659
---

# Building Laravel Saas: Part 1/5 - Choosing Starter Kit

> Source: [Building Laravel Saas: Part 1/5 - Choosing Starter Kit](https://youtube.com/watch?v=_P6JFXqbYhA)

## Summary

The video introduces a new series on building a typical Laravel SaaS application. The creator discusses the importance of choosing the right starter kit, comparing official options like React, Vue, and Livewire, as well as community and paid kits. He ultimately selects the Livewire starter kit for its balance of modern features and minimal prerequisites.

### Key Points

- **Series Introduction** [00:00] — Pradeep announces a new series on building a typical Laravel SaaS, with the first five videos published today. He also promotes a Black Friday deal for Laravel Daily membership.
- **Starter Kit Choice Overview** [00:31] — The first video focuses on choosing a starter kit. The creator explains that many Laravel projects are similar, and mastering topics like multi-tenancy and subscriptions can cover 70% of typical projects.
- **Official Starter Kits** [02:30] — Laravel 12 offers three official starter kits: React, Vue, and Livewire. These require knowledge of the respective frontend technologies, which may be a barrier for backend developers.
- **Older Starter Kits: Breeze and Jetstream** [03:22] — Laravel Breeze and Jetstream are still supported in Laravel 12 but are based on Tailwind 3, which is outdated. Upgrading to Tailwind 4 can be problematic for larger projects.
- **Community Starter Kits** [05:40] — Community kits like those on LaraKits offer alternatives, but they may lack updates and require learning custom code. The creator recommends first-party kits for most cases.
- **Paid Starter Kits** [06:53] — Premium kits like Sassy Kit and LaraFast provide full SaaS features for around $200, but they introduce dependencies and require learning their structure.
- **Choosing Livewire** [07:53] — The creator selects the Livewire starter kit because it is closest to plain Laravel and Blade, uses modern Tailwind 4, and allows adding custom features without using Livewire.
- **Demonstration of Livewire Starter Kit** [08:41] — He shows how to create a simple 'About' page using standard Blade and routing, without writing any Livewire code, proving the kit's flexibility.

### Conclusion

The Livewire starter kit is the recommended choice for building a Laravel SaaS due to its modern stack, minimal prerequisites, and flexibility to use plain Blade when needed.

## Transcript

Hello guys, today I'm starting a new
series of videos on this channel.
Building a typical Laravel SAS. And
first the reminder, today is the last
day for Black Friday deal for Laravel
Daily to get 40% of yearly or lifetime
membership. And this video may convince
you to do that if you haven't taken the
membership yet. So I'm starting a new
course on Laravel Daily, Typical Laravel
SAS. And here on the YouTube channel, I
will publish first five videos today and
then the rest of the week. And the topic
of this first video will be choice of
starter kit. So for now, I have three
videos published as a course. You can
watch them right now on Laravel Daily.
And my plan is to shoot one video per
day or roughly like that and publish
more lessons, which probably will be the
longest course on Laravel Daily ever
because I want to get deeper. I recently
talked oneonone to a lot of Laravel
Daily members and I realized a lot of
them want to create SAS whether for
themselves as a product or for clients.
So I tweeted a few ideas and then after
some feedback and request from the
community I landed on this plan of a
typical Laravel SAS. So the idea is that
if you master those topics like use a
rose multi-tenency subscription and then
a few more extra functions you will be
ready to deliver kind of like 70% of
typical projects with Laravel. Of course
that 70% is number out of thin air but
you get the idea. Many Laravel project
can be boiled down to pretty typical SAS
and for this case for each topic I want
to get deeper explaining why behind the
decisions for example to choose the
starter kit to choose the model of
multi-tenency to choose various
subscription and billing options that's
why the videos will be longer. So for
example, the first video that you will
watch right now in a minute after I stop
talking with the intro will be about
starter kit choice. An 8-minute video
explaining why I chose certain specific
starter kit for Laravel 12 with all the
variety of starter kits now available. I
will pick the one that requires the
least prerequisites and upfront
knowledge while using the most modern
versions of the full stack ecosystem
around Laravel. Maybe you can guess
that. So, if you are intrigued which
starter kit I chose for this video, you
should watch until the end. So, yeah,
enough intro. Let's dive into choosing
the starter kit for a typical SAS. And
again, today is the last day, so-called
Cyber Monday, for 40% off yearly or
lifetime membership. In this video, I
want to start creating my SAS project.
And first, I run Laravel new and then I
immediately have the question, which
starter kit? Over the years in Laravel,
there were a lot of starter kits. and
what is the actual current way to choose
and in this video I want to not just
choose but explain you why and what are
the options and what may be better
option for your case for a different
project. So currently if you Google
Laravel starter kits of course you land
on the official page of starter kits
which show three official Laravel 12
starter kits react view and livewire. If
you choose one of them, basically the
prerequisite is that you work with one
of those full stack technologies, which
may be a problem if you're just a
back-end developer wanting to create
your SAS without learning React viewer
LiveWire. The problem is that there's no
plain blade starter kit, which makes me
turn to older generation of starter
kits. So if we take a look at the
documentation of Laravel 11 starter
kits, we have Breeze and Jetstream which
were both released during Laravel 8
release and they are still supported in
Laravel 12 and they promise to be
supported in the future versions. So you
could choose Laravel Breeze for example
if you just want breeze and blade and I
have a separate tutorial on Laravel
daily how to use breeze in Laravel 12.
So you choose non-starter kit and then
install breeze separately and you get
something like this play and blade with
tailwind and then you create things on
top and to be honest I thought for this
SAS project to choose Laravel breeze to
avoid prerequisites of react view or
live wire but the problem with breeze
and jetream is that it's based on
tailwind 3. So even the structure of how
Tailwind is used in Laravel project for
Breeze, it's a bit different with files
like Tailwind config.js and other a
little outdated structure. So it does
still work and you can use breeze if you
don't care about Tailwind version. And
yes, you can upgrade Tailwind 3 to
Tailwind 4 in Breeze and I have a
separate tutorial for that. But people
in the comments are reporting that this
automatic tailwind upgrade works well
for simple projects but not necessarily
for bigger projects with more
dependencies. Then you have quite a lot
of manual work to upgrade various
components which kind of beats the
purpose of starter kit. Starter kit by
definition should be easy to install and
then you can easily move on to create
your custom code. Right? And if you want
to choose laravel gestream it has two
problems. First problem the same thing
it's tailwind threebased and also here
you still have prerequisites of either
available stocks here you see available
stocks livewire blade or inertia view so
it's not plain blade and this was
actually the reason why Laravel breeze
was created in the first place so back
in Laravel 8 days first Taylor released
jetstream and then the community asked
so what about plain blade and Laravel
breeze was the answer for that so what
we covered so far option one official
starter kit not ideal because they have
prerequisites. Option two, breeze and
jesterream also not ideal because
tailwind 3 and other prerequisites. So
then you may turn to community starter
kits unofficial not firstparty starter
kits and for that I found a website
called Lara kits which lists a lot of
starter kits so we can browse them for
example order by downloads and of course
the official starter kits have the most
amount of downloads but also on top of
that there are things like Genesis
filament starter kits our own Laravel
daily starter kit which is plain blade
and others but I've browsed around those
starter kits And the problem with all of
those, well actually two problems. First
problem, if the starter kit was created
at some time, you don't have any
guarantees it would be updated because
quite often starter kits are created for
their own usage for that company or that
developer. And I see quite often they're
not updated to latest version. So it's
starter kit for the time being. And also
then for each starter kit, you would
still need to learn their code, learn
the documentation, which is not ideal
either. So as much as I like our own
Laravel daily starter kit, it was
created for our own needs, but I would
really recommend firstparty starter kits
in most cases. Finally, before I reveal
which starter kit I will choose for this
SAS, I need to mention paid starter
kits, premium starter kits. I'm not
affiliated with any of them but two of
them are really popular on the market
which is Sassy Kit and Lara Fast. So
they would give you full SAS
capabilities of Laravel and also
Filament on top. So if you want to just
pay money and have a lot of features
inside you can pay roughly $200. The
price is similar for both. So Larfast at
the moment is $1.99 size kit the
cheapest version is $239. And then you
have the list of features something like
this. So it's not starter kit, it's more
like SAS full kit. But then this is of
course another dependency. So you need
to learn how that starter kit works. You
may not like some of their technical
decisions or structure or choice of tech
stack. But if you care about launching
your SAS quickly, this may be the
quickest way. Just pay money and have
full package. And now let's get back to
our terminal and I will choose one of
the starter kits and I will explain why.
So, Laravel new gives us the choice of
these starter kits. And I will choose
Livewire because LiveWire is the closest
option to plain Laravel and Blade. And
you can actually even skip using Live
Wire for custom features on top of the
starter kit. Let me show you that in
action. So, let's choose LiveWire and
let's follow the default installation.
So, built-in authentication. No, I don't
want to use Laravel Vault. I'm good with
best Laravel boost for now. Let's skip
that one. And yeah, the installation
goes on. It will finally ask us to run
npm install and npm run build. And yeah,
it's [clears throat] good. And now in
the browser, if we launch SAS.est
powered by my local Laravel herd, we
have the homepage. And if we try to
register, this is the form powered by
LiveWire. But the thing is for now, we
don't need to change anything in the
code. So we don't really need to use
LiveWire actively or know about it. It
just works. We create account and we're
inside the dashboard. And if we take a
look at the code now, here I am in the
routes web. And as you can see, it's
pretty similar to default Laravel. So
route view, route get. And for some
settings, it uses livewire components,
which act kind of like Laravel
controllers in this case. But then
basically on top of that, we can create
controllers blade views, which would be
just reusing the main layout. But the
main point is that we can do it without
using LiveWire. So let's do exactly
that. Make view pages about which
creates empty blade and then in the
route for example let's add here about
and about page and of course the page is
pages about. Okay. Now let's go to the
dashboard blade page which is X layouts
app. Copy from there pages about. Paste
here. And then let's change the
dashboard to about powered by cursor
tab. And in here, I'm not sure which
part is responsible for the main thing,
but let's just type about page and leave
it as is. And finally, we go to sidebar
blade, which is powering the menu of
LiveWire. And here we have Flux
components, but we don't need to care
much about them. It's using Flux library
free version. And we can just copy paste
without really even digging deeper how
it works. And if we hit tab, cursor
would auto suggest route about. Now if
we refresh our page refresh, we have
about here with the design and with the
page text here inside. And as you can
see, I haven't written any code of
LiveWire, which means that LiveWire
starter kit provides the O functionality
with LiveWire and is closest as you can
be to plain Laravel Blade and good old
Laravel controllers with routing, but
also you have the most modern version of
Tailwind and also in the settings
including pretty recently added two
factor authentication. So yeah, this is
the logic behind the choice of starter
kit for SAS application and in the
future videos we will build features on
top of this starter kit.