I built a production-ready FastAPI SaaS boilerplate — here's what's in it

#webdev #programming #fastapi #python

Every time I start a new backend project I waste the first two days on the exact same things: JWT auth, Stripe subscriptions, database migrations, Docker setup.

So I stopped doing that and packaged everything into a clean, working boilerplate.

Here's what's in it and why I made the choices I did.

Stack

FastAPI — async, fast, auto-generates OpenAPI docs at /docs
SQLAlchemy 2.0 + Alembic — ORM with proper migration support
Pydantic v2 — request/response validation throughout
python-jose — JWT access and refresh tokens
passlib + bcrypt — password hashing
Stripe — subscription billing
SlowAPI — per-route rate limiting
Docker + docker-compose — runs anywhere

SQLite out of the box, one line to switch to Postgres.

Project structure

app/
├── api/routes/     # auth.py, users.py, billing.py
├── core/           # config, database, security
├── models/         # SQLAlchemy models
└── schemas/        # Pydantic v2 schemas

Clean, flat, easy to extend.

Auth

JWT with separate access and refresh tokens. Access tokens expire in 30 minutes, refresh tokens in 7 days. Rate limited at the route level — 5 requests/minute on register, 10 on login.

@router.post("/register", response_model=UserResponse, status_code=201)
@limiter.limit("5/minute")
def register(request: Request, user_data: UserCreate, db: Session = Depends(get_db)):
    if db.query(User).filter(User.email == user_data.email).first():
        raise HTTPException(status_code=400, detail="Email already registered")
    ...

Stripe subscriptions

Full subscription flow: checkout session creation, success redirect, webhook handling for cancellations and failed payments.

Protecting a route behind an active subscription is one dependency:

from app.core.security import get_current_active_subscriber

@router.get("/premium-feature")
def premium(current_user: User = Depends(get_current_active_subscriber)):
    return {"data": "only for paying customers"}

Returns 402 Payment Required automatically if the user has no active plan.

Database migrations

Alembic is wired up and the initial migration is included. Adding a new field to a model and generating a migration is one command:

alembic revision --autogenerate -m "add new field"
alembic upgrade head

Up and running in 5 minutes

git clone https://github.com/thask8lo/fastapi-saas-starter
cd fastapi-saas-starter

python -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate  # Windows: venv\Scripts\activate

pip install -r requirements.txt
cp .env.example .env
alembic upgrade head
uvicorn app.main:app --reload