Stop Building SaaS from Scratch: Meet the SeaNotes Starter Kit

Stop Building SaaS from Scratch: Meet the SeaNotes Starter Kit | DigitalOcean

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Dark mode is coming soon. Community Stop Building SaaS from Scratch: Meet the SeaNotes Starter Kit

By Amit Jotwani and Haimantika Mitra

Published: August 21, 2025 3 min read

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There’s a moment in every SaaS project where you realize…

You’re not building your product yet.

You’re setting up auth. You’re wiring up Stripe. You’re figuring out how to send emails, where to store files, how to deploy it — and now, how to sprinkle in just enough AI to make it feel modern.

Even in 2025, LLMs still struggle with this part. They’re great at scaffolding UI and generating business logic. But they don’t know how to spin up a database, integrate Stripe, or deploy an actual app.

That’s exactly what SeaStack solves.

SeaStack is a new series of open-source starter kits and reference apps from DigitalOcean — built to help developers ship real apps, faster.

It’s our way of saying: “ Here’s how you can build real things with DigitalOcean — and here’s the source code to get started. ”

And SeaNotes is the first one.

Live Demo

View the GitHub Repo

What is SeaNotes?

SeaNotes SaaS Starter Kit is an open source GitHub repo that gives developers a simple, production-ready foundation to build real SaaS apps — fast.

It’s a full-stack notes app that comes pre-wired with real services most SaaS apps need:

✅ User Auth with NextAuth.js

✅ Stripe billing (upgrade, cancel, customer portal)

✅ File uploads using DigitalOcean Spaces

✅ Transactional Email via Resend

✅ PostgreSQL database hosted on DigitalOcean

✅ AI features powered by DigitalOcean’s Gradient AI™ Platform

✅ One-click deploy to DigitalOcean App Platform

View YouTube video

Who It’s For

SeaNotes is built for:

Indie hackers

Solo developers

Early-stage startup teams

Developers validating new ideas

Anyone looking to build fast with best practices baked in

It Solves the Right User Stories (So You Don’t Have To)

SeaNotes handles the foundational features most SaaS products need:

✅ Sign up and log in

✅ Verify email and reset password

✅ Log in via magic link or password

✅ Upload a profile image

✅ Upgrade or downgrade billing plans via Stripe

✅ Generate invoices

✅ Generate AI-powered content using Gradient AI™ Platform

✅ Create notes — and if you skip the title, the AI generates one automatically

✅ Start with a clean, simple notes UI

All of this is baked in — so you can skip the glue work and focus on building your actual product.

Works Great with LLMs

You can use SeaNotes in two ways:

Starter Kit – Clone your own fork of the repo, build your business logic on top, and launch.

Reference App – Point Claude, ChatGPT, or Cursor at the codebase and say:

“Build me something like this… but for customer support tickets.”

“Rewrite this to manage bookings instead of notes.”

“Add a feature that lets users tag notes and filter by tag.”

Because the infra is already handled, LLMs can focus on your logic , not boilerplate setup.

Complete Feature Set

🧾 Billing and Invoice Generation

🧑‍💼Admin Dashboard

🧠 Generate a note with Gradient Serverless Inference

👤User Profile Settings

System Status

There’s even a built-in /system-status page to show you what’s working and what’s not.

Try It Out

If you’ve been meaning to build a SaaS app — this should make it easier.

Everything’s set up: auth, billing, email, storage, AI, deployment. You can use it as a starting point or just see how things are wired together.

Get Started

The safest way to work with SeaNotes is to fork it first, then clone your fork locally. That way, all your changes live in your own repo.

Step 1: Fork the repo to your own GitHub account (button in the top right on GitHub)

Step 2: Clone your fork locally:

git clone https://github.com/ /sea-notes-saas-starter-kit.git cd sea-notes-saas-starter-kit/application

Step 3: Install dependencies

npm install

Step 4: Start local PostgreSQL with Docker (-d runs it in the background)

docker-compose up -d

Step 5: Prepare the database schema

npx prisma generate npx prisma migrate deploy

Step 6: Run the app locally

npm run dev

Live Demo

GitHub Repo

One-Click Deploy

We’ll be iterating on this and releasing more kits as part of SeaStack — so if there’s something you’d like to see baked in, or a service you wish we’d integrate next, let us know.

Feedback, ideas, feature requests — all welcome.

We can’t wait to see what you ship !

About the author(s)

Amit Jotwani Author

Developer Educator

See author profile Amit is a Developer Advocate at DigitalOcean 🐳, where he helps developers build and ship better apps on the cloud. Compulsive Seinfeld quoter. LEGO nerd. 🧱 AMA.

See author profile

Haimantika Mitra Author

Engineer & Writer

See author profile A Developer Advocate by profession. I like to build with Cloud, GenAI and can build beautiful websites using JavaScript.

See author profile

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