I've started the same SaaS project maybe a dozen times. Workspaces. Members. Roles. Billing webhooks. The "did this email actually verify or did Stripe fire the wrong event?" debugging session at 1am. Every time, the first two weeks of work were the same two weeks of work.

So I built a starter kit. It's called Orbit, and the CLI to scaffold it is create-orb. Last month I open-sourced the core of it. This post is about what's free, what isn't, and why I drew the line where I did — because "freemium open source" is a phrase that gets a lot of side-eye, deservedly, and I want to be straight about how this one works.

What you get for free

npm create orb@latest my-app

That command gives you, with no account and no payment:

A Hono API with proper DDD layering — bounded contexts, repositories, a UnitOfWork, an EventBus.…