Dough
The starter you can customize and still update.
Build your foundation once — then never rebuild it, never get locked in, never fall behind. Vibe-code on top, sell anything, swap any provider without losing customers, and inherit every upgrade we ship — new features, providers and fixes — across all your apps.
Most boilerplates lock you in by default.
They weld you to one payment provider, one email service, one host. When one of them turns on you, ripping it out means rewriting your app — usually right when you can least afford to.
Your payments get frozen
A provider flags your account at 2am. Revenue stops. With most starters, Stripe is hardcoded into a hundred files.
Your email gets throttled
The ESP marks you as spam and your password resets stop landing. Switching shouldn't mean re-templating everything.
Your host hikes the bill
Pricing triples once you're locked in. Migrating off becomes a quarter-long project instead of a config change.
Swap any provider. Keep every customer.
Dough puts 100+ payment providers behind a single interface. Email runs through a provider-agnostic layer with 15+ ESP/SMTP options. Hosting isn't assumed. The thing that locks other starters in is the thing Dough is built to let go of.
- Switch payment providers without touching your checkout
- Move email to another ESP without re-writing a single template
- Customers and subscriptions carry over — no migration drama
Change the provider underneath. Your code, customers and subscriptions don't move.
Vibe-code the product, not the plumbing.
AI is brilliant at building features and terrible at deciding architecture — it scaffolds something different on every prompt. Dough hands your assistant one known-good base to build on, so the vibe-coding goes into what's new, not the same foundation again.
- ✗ A different project structure on every prompt
- ✗ You debug auth, billing & webhooks yourself
- ✗ Edge cases show up live, in production
- ✗ Every new product starts from an empty folder
- ✗ Lock-in baked in by whatever the AI reached for first
- ✓ One consistent base your assistant navigates every time
- ✓ Auth, payments & teams already wired together
- ✓ Battle-tested edge cases handled before you ship
- ✓ Every product starts ~80% built
- ✓ Providers stay swappable — no lock-in by accident
Bring Claude Code, Cursor or Windsurf — Dough doesn't care which.
If you can price it, Dough can sell it.
Not just monthly subscriptions. Lifetime licences, one-off objects, configurable options, usage tiers, and genuinely complex pricing — all handled by the same billing core.
Subscriptions
Monthly, annual, trials, proration — the usual SaaS recurring billing, done right.
Lifetime licences
One-time deals — perfect for AppSumo-style launches and founding offers.
Objects & options
Physical or digital goods with variants and add-ons. E-commerce, not just SaaS.
Complex pricing
Tiers, metering, bundles, seat-based — model pricing that doesn't fit a box.
One command keeps it fresh — forever.
Most boilerplates are a snapshot: you buy it once, then you own the maintenance. Dough is built to evolve. Run one command and pull the latest security fixes, provider updates and new features into your app — without untangling someone else's old code by hand.
- Security and dependency updates handled for you
- New providers and features arrive as upgrades, not rewrites
- Stop owning the part of your codebase you never wanted to maintain
Dough doesn't assume a host. Ship it to your VPS, a container platform, or a managed PaaS — your call, your bill, no lock-in there either.
Every ingredient, already measured.
The plumbing every serious product needs — built once, wired together, and (you guessed it) swappable.
◆ Payments
100+ providers behind one checkout. Switch without losing customers.
◆ Transactional email
Provider-agnostic layer with 15+ ESP / SMTP options. Re-route deliverability in minutes.
◆ Authentication
Classic login, 50+ social providers, and magic-code sign-in out of the box.
◆ Teams & permissions
Workspaces, invites, and role-based permissions so customers can bring their team.
◆ SEO & GEO blog
A blog tuned for search and for AI indexing (GEO), so you get found both ways.
◆ Notifications
In-app and email notifications wired to the same provider-agnostic email layer.
◆ Cookies & consent
GDPR-ready consent handling so you're compliant from your first visitor.
◆ Changelog
A built-in changelog to show customers what's new — without bolting on a tool.
◆ Case studies
Publish customer success stories on a page that's built to convert.
…and more landing every week. We're just getting started.
Boring where it counts. Flexible where you are.
A proven backend with a frontend you choose. No exotic dependencies to babysit.
Get in before the oven's hot.
A limited founding cohort shapes Dough with us — locking a lifetime deal with no renewals, ever, that won't exist once we launch.
The price climbs as spots fill, then disappears at launch. Join now to lock the lowest rung.
- Lifetime access & every future module and update
- Lifetime maintenance — update with one command, no yearly renewal (launch buyers renew; founders never do)
- A direct line to the founder & a vote on the roadmap
Join the waitlist now — founding spots open to the list first.
Why I'm building Dough.
I don't build one product — I build several. And the same three problems kept slowing me down.
The first was getting locked in. I'd pick a payment provider or an email service, wire my whole app around it, and then it would change its terms or freeze an account — and I'd be stuck rewriting code I'd already written. I wanted providers to be replaceable, not load-bearing.
The second was maintenance — and the trap that comes with it. Every product needs the same core: payments, a blog, auth, the boring plumbing. But the moment you start customizing a starter — especially vibe-coding hard on top of it — you fork away from it. Your version and the original drift apart, and pulling in a fix or a new feature later turns into a painful manual merge. So you accept a trade-off: keep it pristine and stay upgradable, or make it truly yours and lose updates forever.
I didn't want that trade-off. I wanted to vibe-code freely on every app and still upgrade all of them with one command — without my own changes getting in the way.
The third was time to launch. Starting a new idea meant rebuilding that whole foundation before I could touch the part that was actually new.
Dough is the base I wish I'd had: providers you can swap, a core you can build on as hard as you like and still update once across every product, and a starting point that's already most of the way there — so the next idea ships in days, not months.
It's almost finished, and that's exactly why this page exists. Get on the list and tell me what you'd build on it.
Before you join the list.
When does Dough launch? +
We're in active prelaunch. The core is being baked now and founding bakers get access first. Join the waitlist and you'll get one honest email the moment early access opens — plus roadmap updates as we ship.
What does "anti-lock" actually mean? +
Payments run through a unified layer (100+ providers behind one interface), email runs through a provider-agnostic layer with 15+ ESP/SMTP options, and hosting isn't assumed. So if a vendor freezes you, hikes prices, or just annoys you, switching is a config change — your customers and subscriptions come along.
Which frontend can I use? +
Your pick — Svelte, Vue, React, or plain HTML/JS or all of them, all styled with Tailwind. The backend is Django, with Redis for cache and Celery for async tasks.
Do I need to be a Django expert? +
No. Dough is opinionated and well-structured precisely so AI assistants like Claude Code and Cursor can work in it productively. The boring decisions are already made — you (and your assistant) build features on top.
What do founding bakers get? +
Lifetime access, a founding price that's locked forever and won't exist at launch, every future update, a direct line to the founder, a vote on the roadmap, and your name in the credits. Founding spots open to the waitlist first.
How do updates work? +
Dough is built to evolve. One command pulls in security fixes, provider updates and new features — so you stop owning the maintenance you never wanted, and your app keeps improving without manual rewrites.
Join the first bakers.
Get early access, lock in the founding deal, and help shape Dough before the oven's hot.