A framework, or a SaaS boilerplate?
A boilerplate gives you a fast first day. Intelligo gives you the same first day and a way to take the next fix to auth, billing or credits without merging it by hand.
A boilerplate is a copy.
Intelligo is a dependency, plus source you own.
Both put working sign-up, teams and billing in front of you on the first day. The difference is who owns each file afterwards: with a boilerplate, all of it is yours to maintain. With Intelligo, the engine stays an npm package you upgrade, and only the pages become your source — four kinds of file, four owners.
What changes, topic by topic
| Topic | A typical boilerplate | Intelligo |
|---|---|---|
| What you get | A repository to copy: auth, billing, a dashboard and a landing page, already wired together. | 11 npm packages for the engine, and the pages installed into your app as source with the shadcn CLI. |
| Updates | The kit keeps moving after you fork it. Taking a fix means merging it into code you have changed. | Packages upgrade by version. intelligo upgrade --check says which generated files changed upstream and which you edited, and overwrites nothing. |
| Database changes | Migrations live in your fork; a new one from the kit is yours to reconcile. | intelligo migrate applies the framework's schema by content hash in one transaction; migrate --check gates a deploy. |
| What you edit | Everything — which is also why every later update is a merge. | The pages, through config files and message files they ship; the packages never. Your agent is untouched. |
| Workspaces and roles | Often included; how deep it goes varies by kit. | Multi-tenant workspaces, invitations and role checks on Better-Auth, with every query scoped to a workspace. |
| AI cost and credits | Some kits add a credit counter. Cost per run is usually yours to build. | Every run is admitted, settled or failed once: entitlement checked, worst-case cost reserved, actual usage charged in credits. |
| Audit and operations | Rarely included. | Append-only audit events a Postgres trigger enforces, a Postgres job queue, and an admin console across tenants. |
| Your AI framework | Whatever the kit chose, or none. | Any, used natively. Intelligo has no agent abstraction; the chat route is the AI SDK's. |
| Price and licence | Some are free; most complete kits are a one-time licence. | Free. Apache-2.0, including the pages. |
Boilerplates differ; the left column is what most of them share, not any one kit. The right column is what the docs and the source show.
When a boilerplate is the better choice
- You want a marketing site, blog and docs in the same repository.
- Intelligo ships the product's pages, not a landing page.
- Your stack is not Next.js and Postgres.
- The packages assume both; a kit for your stack will fit better.
- You will never take an update.
- If the fork is the finished product, a snapshot is simpler than a dependency.
- You never want an API to change under you.
- Intelligo is a dependency at 1.2.4, versioned by semver: a major release can change its API, and you take it when you upgrade.
Run it before you decide
Getting started creates an app, connects Postgres and runs the whole product against a stub model, before you configure an AI provider. The other alternatives — building in-house, an AI platform, prompting a coding agent from zero — are on /why.
Ready to try it? Three commands and the app runs against a stub model.