LaunchKit vs DIY: Building with Cursor + Stripe + Supabase

The DIY Promise

The pitch is seductive: "I'll just use Cursor to build it myself. Supabase for the backend, Stripe for payments. Free tools, total control, custom everything."

On paper, this sounds smarter than paying for a starter kit. You're a developer. You can figure this out. And you'll own every line of code.

Here's what happens in practice.

Week 1: The Setup

You scaffold a Next.js project. Connect Supabase. Set up auth. Everything's moving fast. Cursor is helping you write code at 3x speed. You're feeling good.

End of week one: you have auth and a database. Same as every boilerplate gives you for free.

Week 2-4: The Integration Maze

Now you need payments. Stripe seems simple until you discover:

• Webhook handling is more complex than the docs suggest
• Subscription states have edge cases (past_due, canceled, paused)
• Your database schema doesn't quite match Stripe's data model
• Testing requires either real payments or intricate mocking

Cursor helps you write the code. It doesn't help you design the system. Every decision you make now affects everything you build later.

Week 5-8: The Missing Pieces

You shipped payments. Now you realise you need:

• Lead capture: Where are your waitlist signups going?
• CRM: Who are your users? What stage are they at?
• Email integration: How do you reach people who signed up?
• Booking: How do demo requests become meetings?

Each of these is "just a few days of work." Together, they're two months of integration hell.

The Real Cost of DIY

Let's do the math:

• Stripe integration: 40-60 hours
• Lead capture + CRM: 30-50 hours
• Email service integration: 15-25 hours
• Booking system: 20-30 hours
• Admin dashboards: 30-40 hours
• Testing and debugging: 40+ hours

Conservative total: 175-245 hours. At $75/hour (a modest rate for an experienced developer), that's $13,000-18,000 in time cost.

"Free" DIY just cost you more than buying a house worth of time.

What LaunchKit Gives You Instead

Everything above — already built, already integrated, already tested:

• Complete Stripe integration with proper webhook handling
• Lead capture flowing into built-in CRM
• Email service integrations (Mailchimp, ConvertKit, etc.)
• Booking system connected to leads
• Admin dashboards ready to use

You still own the code. You still use Cursor to customise. But you skip 200 hours of integration work.

You Still Own Everything

This is the key misconception about starter kits: people think they're giving up control.

You're not. LaunchKit is a codebase, not a platform. You clone it, you own it, you modify it however you want. Cursor works exactly the same on LaunchKit as it does on a blank project.

The difference is where you start. DIY starts at zero. LaunchKit starts at "production-ready."

When DIY Makes Sense

Build from scratch if:

• Learning is the goal, not launching
• Your requirements are genuinely unusual
• You have unlimited time and no revenue pressure
• You enjoy infrastructure work more than product work

For everyone else: skip the integration months and start building what makes your product unique.