iOS Boilerplate for Side Projects That Respects Your Hours

Side projects don't fail at the idea — they stall in the foundation

The graveyard of unfinished iOS side projects is full of apps that never got past the boring part. You have a real job, so you get maybe five or six usable hours a week. The first weekend goes to setting up a project, the second to wrestling Sign in with Apple, the third to a paywall that still doesn't restore purchases correctly — and by then the spark is gone and life has moved on. The Swift Kit exists because that foundation work is identical in almost every app and it's the single biggest reason nights-and-weekends builds die. When the scaffolding is already done, the momentum you feel on day one is spent on the thing only you can build: your idea.

What's already wired so your scarce hours aren't

Every module below is the kind of work that feels productive but produces nothing a user will ever notice. The Swift Kit ships all of it done and toggleable, so a side project starts at the interesting part instead of the plumbing.

• Supabase auth (email + Sign in with Apple), Postgres, storage, and Edge Functions — no afternoon lost to OAuth callbacks
• RevenueCat paywall and multi-tier subscriptions already integrated — restore purchases works on the first try
• AI baked in: OpenAI streaming chat, DALL·E, Vision, Anthropic Claude, and free on-device Apple Foundation Models, with API keys proxied server-side so nothing leaks
• A centralized 5-layer DesignSystem.swift — retheme the whole app from one file in an evening, not a design sprint you'll never finish
• 6 feature flags (onboarding, auth, paywall, push, AI, Apple Sign-In) so you ship only what this weekend's project needs

Built to fit a single sitting, not a roadmap

A side project boilerplate is only useful if you can actually stand it up in the time you have. The Swift Kit's interactive ./setup.sh asks for your app name, colors, surface style, modules, and API keys, then hands you a buildable, themed app before your coffee gets cold. You don't read 79 pages of docs first — though they're there along with 79+ SwiftUI tutorials and 6 free dev tools when you hit a wall at 11pm. The point is that the gap between 'I had an idea on Sunday' and 'it runs on my phone' is measured in minutes, so the project survives long enough to become real. Three onboarding styles, TelemetryDeck analytics, and push notifications are already in place for when you decide to actually launch.

When building from scratch is the honest choice

This kit is not for every side project, and pretending otherwise would waste your money. If your weekend hobby is learning — you want to feel SwiftUI's friction, understand how Sign in with Apple actually works, or write your own StoreKit layer for the craft of it — then a boilerplate robs you of the lesson, and you should build from scratch. The same goes for a tiny single-screen utility with no auth, no payments, and no AI: the kit's machinery is overhead you don't need. And if your side project is an Android-first or cross-platform experiment, a native SwiftUI kit is the wrong tool entirely. The Swift Kit pays off specifically when your side project has real app bones — accounts, a paywall, maybe AI — and your constraint is hours, not curiosity.

Swift Kit vs. building your side project from scratch

Frequently Asked Questions