What is Hype Stack

Hype Stack is two things that work together.

The first is the starter: a free, open-source full-stack codebase with a React 19 frontend, a Hono backend on Postgres, a desktop build, an Expo mobile app, a browser extension, and the types, tests, and local infrastructure already wired between them. You can clone it today and it runs.

The second is a catalog of features you install into that starter with one CLI command. Auth, organizations, billing, notifications, a calendar, a whiteboard, an AI workspace: each arrives as source files in your repository, not as a dependency in your package.json. Pick the ones you need, skip the rest, and edit any of it afterwards.

The starter ships without those features on purpose. It is a blank canvas that already knows how to be an app.

The three pieces

Selling packs is what funds the open-source starter. The free core stays free.

Packs

A pack is a feature delivered as files. There are eighteen today, in three categories.

Starters decide how identity works, and everything else builds on one of them. You install exactly one.

• starter-auth-betterauth is free: email and Google sign-in, sessions, a profile page, and a minimal admin console. Every account gets a personal workspace, which is what lets every feature pack install on it.
• starter-saas-betterauth and starter-saas-workos add organizations with members and invitations, roles and permissions enforced on the server and mirrored in the UI, per-organization feature flags, and an admin app with users, organizations, and a dashboard.

Starting free and moving to a SaaS starter later is one command. The schema is the same, so nothing migrates.

Layouts decide how the app is shelled: the sidebar, the navigation, the settings pages. layout-basic is free. layout-glass, layout-joyful, and layout-native-app-shell are paid. All four are interchangeable, so you can swap the whole look without touching feature code.

Feature packs are the drop-ins.

Browse them all on the packs page, where every pack has a live preview you can click through before buying.

Templates

A template is an opinionated product on top of the starter: a starter, a layout, the feature packs that fit, a custom theme, and screens built for one kind of product.

Every template page has a recording of the real app running, so you can judge it before you spend anything.

How you build with it

# Start from a curated product
npx @hype-stack/cli template aether

# Or pick packs yourself, interactively
npx @hype-stack/cli compose

# Or take the bare starter with nothing added
npx @hype-stack/cli create my-app

compose does more than copy files. It resolves what a pack depends on, checks your license, writes the source into your repo, runs codemods so the new code is wired into your existing routes and navigation, merges the Prisma schema, offers to run the migration, and records the result in stack.json. Then onboard walks you through the environment variables the new packs need.

Add a pack in month six and the same thing happens. The CLI keeps working after day one.

Prefer to stay in your editor? The CLI is also an MCP server. Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, and VS Code can search the catalog, scaffold, and install packs through it.

What "you own the code" means

Packs are copied, not installed, the same way shadcn/ui works. That has consequences worth being clear about:

• No runtime dependency on us. Your app does not call our servers or import our packages. Delete the CLI and the app keeps running.
• No version lock. The files are yours. Rename things, delete half of a feature, restyle all of it. Nothing breaks upstream.
• One payment, lifetime downloads. A pack or template you buy is yours for good: install it on as many of your own projects as you like, and pull every update we ship to it. No renewal.
• All-Access is the yearly plan. It unlocks the whole catalog, including packs released during the year, for 12 months of downloads. When the year ends you keep everything already in your repository. You renew only if you want the next year of new packs. See pricing for the tiers and how team seats work.
• The trade-off is upgrades. Because you own the files, improvements we ship later do not arrive automatically. You re-run the CLI and merge what you want, like any vendored code.

You can also write packs of your own and install them from a folder, a git repo, or npm. See Build your own pack.

Who it's for

People shipping a product where the product is the business: a SaaS with users, organizations, billing, and a real backend. Solo founders who do not want to spend two weeks on plumbing, and small teams who want a codebase with conventions from the first commit.

It is also built to be worked on with AI. The repo ships editor rules for Cursor, T3 Code, Claude, Codex, Copilot, OpenCode, and Windsurf, as many at once as your team needs, plus a starter set of agent skills, and the structure is regular enough that an agent can find its way around. See working with AI.

When it is the wrong tool

• A marketing site or a blog. Use Astro or a static site generator. This is an application stack.
• A small internal CRUD tool over an API you already have. Something like Refine will get you there faster.
• You want a platform that also hosts and deploys for you. Hype Stack gives you a repository and Docker containers. deploy puts them on Fly or Railway for you, but the account and the bill are yours.

How the pieces connect

Once a starter is installed, the monorepo looks like this at runtime:

The frontend and admin are separate Vite apps, the mobile app is Expo, and the extension is its own Vite build per browser. The backend is a Node Hono server with an in-process cron scheduler for background jobs. Postgres, Valkey, and object storage run in Docker locally, or on Fly / Railway when you deploy. The CLI (@hype-stack/cli) and the pack registry live outside your project. They write files into it, then get out of the way.

How to use these docs

If you are onboarding, read in this order:

1. Installation or Fastest Template
2. Technologies for the stack and runtime boundaries
3. CLI for create, compose, template, onboard, deploy, and mcp
4. Frontend, Backend, and Mobile when you change app code
5. Packs and templates setup for credentials and env vars per feature

After that, jump to the system you are changing: Authentication, Organizations, Billing, or Going to production.

Where to go next

• Fastest Template: a running app in about a minute.
• Technologies: every library in the stack, the repo layout, and why each piece is there.
• Add a template and add a pack: the CLI in detail.
• Packs and templates setup: the external accounts and environment variables each one needs.