🚀 Welcome to RailsFast!
Welcome to RailsFast!
You're only a few minutes away from putting your first RailsFast app in production!
But first of all: thanks for purchasing! You've made a great choice. This single decision could very well be the start of your own software business; or it could be the lever to finally take that idea you've been wanting to build into reality.
👉 You can go straight ahead and start building now, or you can read below why I made this project.
Why RailsFast
RailsFast is essentially a template, but it's also a bit more than a template – as you'll soon discover. It's a way of building and running software startups in a very solid, secure, and streamlined way. A way that gives you back total freedom, ownership, and control over your software business so you can be fast and independent. I (Javi, the maker of RailsFast, the one writing all these docs) personally think this is the best way one could build and run SaaS and web apps, and that's why I myself use RailsFast for every new app I make.
Building a software startup means making millions of tiny decisions, and the promise when buying a template is that most of those decisions are made for you, giving that time back to you and freeing you up to build the actual product instead. That's a great responsibility, and the template is only as powerful as the quality of the decisions it incorporates. If the person building the template makes the wrong decisions, those bad decisions cascade downstream and multiply for every single user of the template. It's unfortunately not uncommon to see fairly inexperienced developers making templates that are later found to contain massive flaws that could have been easy to prevent, causing a lot of headaches for a lot of people. It's also unfortunately not uncommon to see templates made by seasoned engineers that despite their technical ability have never built a run any software business other than the template itself – which also reflects in the quality of the decisions, because all of a sudden the entire thing is a maze of technical complexity that cripples any aspiring entrepreneur just wanting to put something fast out there.
As for myself, I've been both developing software and running startups for the past 10+ years. I'm familiar with the technical stuff and the business pains. I put my first website on the internet in 2006, and since then I've created and scaled Rails startups to over 4+ million users a month, I've built Ruby gems downloaded 100k+ times, I've perfected Rails SEO to get Google to send my websites millions of clicks in organic traffic, I've been viral with Rails-based AI projects featured on media like The Washington Post, Fast Company, TNW; and I've made dozens of other projects, not only Rails-based. I've launched apps using everything from TypeScript and JavaScript, to PHP, to React / Next, to Python. Throughout the years I've tried and tested many technologies, libraries and frameworks, and I wouldn't use anything other than Ruby on Rails to build and run a web-based software businesses – that's why Ruby on Rails is the technology of choice for this template. You only have to look at the list of startups that are made with Rails (GitHub, Shopify, Coinbase...) to realize you'll be in great company.
As for security, scalability, performance, auth, and those other myriads of little yet critical decisions: RailsFast incorporates everything I've learned in my 10+ years building and running startups. I had to scale startups to millions of users, but I've also been hacked, I've been DDoS'd, I've been penalized by Google, botnets from Kazakhstan have tried to jam my API endpoints... I've seen a fair deal of things. I'm by no means perfect, but every one of those things left scar tissue that I've now coded into RailsFast, to prevent some of those problems (or at least help a little bit) and make your journey easier.
I started making RailsFast after selling PromptHero, my biggest Rails-based startup to date. I launched it in 2022 and it grew very very fast, so I had to develop a lot of things very quickly. I was surprised I had to develop from scratch things as basic and universal as a user credits system or plan limits enforcement; and since the business was growing so fast I couldn't spend much time engineering, so the resulting quality of those systems was not the best. That's why when after selling the business I started creating new projects, and I came across the exact same problems, I couldn't believe I had to re-implement these things all over again. But since this time over I could spend a bit more time engineering, I set out to do things right. So for an entire year I broke down into Ruby gems all the little parts from PromptHero that I needed to reuse in my new apps. The result were 15+ Ruby gems I could stack up like LEGO pieces to build new apps very fast. It worked, and now thousands of developers around the world use them. But I was still spending a lot of time wiring everything together for every new project. I was missing something that would bring all those gems into a cohesive template that just worked, with everything already wired up and preconfigured out of the box, so I could just clone it and make new projects like churros. That was the starting point for RailsFast.
Then of course the AI-assisted coding revolution was ongoing, and I saw a lot of my peers struggling with vibe coding. At first I didn't get it, because it worked so well for me. Then I realized a few main differences between their approach and mine. The first thing was the choice of technology: Rails is simply superior for vibe coding compared to, say, JavaScript. That alone would explain the difference in results, but on top of it they were also asking the AI to create everything from scratch for every new project. Without a template that leverages known truths, learnings, and well-tested libraries, what you get is a blob of hallucinated spaghetti code: the perfect recipe for disaster. And lastly, I realized the way I structured my Rails projects was fairly optimized for AI. If you write good context (rules, prompts, etc.) and organize things logically, the AI agents understand quickly what to do in each part of the codebase, which makes things significantly easier and more accurate. So I decided to make RailsFast not just good for manually cloning and building a startup, but designed explicitly for AI from the beginning.
Other than Rails, AI, and code itself, I've also arrived at a pretty stable set of external tools I now use in literally every project. I think those are the best tools one could use, and therefore RailsFast is designed for them. For example, RailsFast uses Stripe for payment processing, Cloudflare for caching and DDoS prevention, Hetzner for servers to deploy your app to, and R2/S3 for storage. I believe this stack is extremely well battle-tested and maximizes your freedom & ownership as a software business owner. It also happens to be dirt cheap (or straight up free), allowing you to launch and run many app ideas for close to nothing.
You can change everything in RailsFast, of course. At the end of the day it's just code you can edit. But if you change some of these essential pieces, it will be at the cost of adding a lot of complexity. As a rule of thumb: RailsFast, as you bought it, is guaranteed to work. Mess with the recipe, and it may no longer work. I believe it's opinionated in a good way: it makes a lot of good decisions for you, so you can fully focus on building your product; and it provides strong guardrails for the AI so it gets things done without getting lost.
The other thing I believe RailsFast excels at is forcing you to ship early, and ship often. You're going to be pushing things to production since the very first minute of the onboarding. This is because the single biggest and most common mistake for entrepreneurs like us is launching too late. We tend to spend too much time developing locally without ever showing anyone, and it's often the case that our projects never see the light of day. Who knows why: maybe we think they're never good enough to be made public, or maybe by the time we're happy the project is already too complex to be put in production easily.
The result in any case is that we keep postponing the moment of publishing, and by the time we realize, months have already passed. Since this is probably the #1 problem for software entrepreneurs like us, it's exactly what we're going to address first thing in RailsFast. We're going to completely reverse the order things are usually done, and so we're going to launch our app first in the quickstart. We'll begin our journey by publishing our project, giving us a shareable URL straight from the beginning, and forcing us to ship, and to do so iteratively. It'll help us develop a bias towards action. It will only be after your project is live and online for everyone to see that we'll start developing it. I deeply believe having an unfinished website already live will give you motivation to fix it and build, and most importantly: to share your project from the start.
With that being said, I really hope you put RailsFast to good use! I myself am going to be building many things based off it, so expect the template to get updated and improved as I launch new stuff. I truly believe you're at an advantage here over any other JavaScript-based templates or people rawdogging vibe coding, and I think you'll realize it too very soon. If you build something cool with RailsFast please let me know on X so I can see it and add it to the list of projects in the RailsFast website!
👉 Your journey starts here! Good luck!