TL;DR: You can now build and launch any web app with Gadget — not just Shopify apps.

Gadget is the easiest way to build, launch, and scale Shopify apps, and today, we’re making our platform and all its capabilities available to any JS developer, regardless of what they’re looking to build. We’ve introduced new features and functionality that make it easy to build any web app, whether you’re powering internal tools for your company or creating SaaS apps for the masses.

No matter what you want to build, Gadget lets you go from concept to production in a matter of hours.

Build web apps really, really fast

Starting today, you can build any JS-powered web app in Gadget.

Gadget web app projects give you the ability to build and launch any JS-powered web application, be it a standalone SaaS app built for the masses, or internal tools for you and your colleagues. It gives you all of the Gadget features and infrastructure you’re used to, with a few additions:

• Every project starts with a zero-setup authentication and user management system that works out of the box. You won’t waste your time building user management for your app, because Gadget sets it up for you. 
• If you’re building a SaaS app, you won’t have to worry about configuring your billing system either. Gadget gives you a forkable template that connects your app to Stripe in minutes. 

Rather than spending your time building the same old, same old, you can focus on the features that actually make your web applications unique and special, and that’s almost certainly not auth or billing.

The features you need, ready in an instant

Start every project with a working auth

Authenticate users in seconds with Gadget’s built-in capabilities. Get a working login form with Google SSO on the frontend, and extensible server-side actions to ensure only the right people have access to the sensitive parts of your application.

The old way

We’ve all had to navigate the auth setup for a project at some point. You research and choose the best auth provider, sign up, and then you have to spend hours writing the code to connect to your backend and your frontend separately. You have to worry about creating users, securely verifying credentials on login, and defining a control flow that protects pages that need to be secured from unauthenticated access.

Tools like Clerk, Supabase, and Vercel have made the process much easier, but you still have to spend hours, or even days, reading their docs, and learning how to get multiple products to play nicely with one another.

With Gadget, you now get auth out of the box — with zero setup. 

The Gadget way

As soon as you start a new Gadget project, you’ve got auth working end-to-end. Your users can instantly sign in with Google OAuth and access the protected areas of your frontend. 

The Google OAuth integration gives your app instant access to Google’s tried and true SSO experience, and with the upcoming addition of email and password, you’ll have a login form that works out of the box. With both options, the frontend instantly works, looks great, and can be customized with a little bit of code. The backend is already wired up and working, and built with industry-leading best practices to prevent malicious behavior like brute-force prevention.

Auth also comes with a set of useful hooks and components, designed for building common workflows.

The components allow you to quickly control the layout of your application based on authentication state, with React components like <inline-code><SignedIn /><inline-code> and <inline-code><SignedOut /><inline-code> to easily allow for conditional component rendering.

Your project is automatically set up with our Google OAuth credentials so you can start using it in development right away. Once you’re ready to go live, you simply replace our credentials with your own and you’re all set.

‍Learn more about how Auth works in our guides.

Add in Stripe Billing in minutes

Add billing to your projects in minutes with our plug-and-play Stripe template and billing UI. We provide you with a customizable plans and pricing page, along with extensible server-side functionality to power it all.  On the frontend, the template includes a plans and pricing UI that can be customized to fit your needs, along with all the necessary redirects to Stripe Checkout. On the backend, the template is set up to create subscriptions, charge customers, and listen to the necessary Stripe webhooks to stay on top of failed charges and billing issues. 

You can fork the Stripe billing template here.

All the Gadget goodies you know and love

Gadget’s cloud-based development and production environments are live from the moment your project is created. Every project comes provisioned with a Postgres database, React frontend, auto-generated public APIs, one-click deploys, and zero-maintenance infrastructure that auto-scales along with your project. Our suite of full-stack features make it the perfect platform to build any JS-powered web app, whether that’s a standalone SaaS product built for the masses, or internal tooling for your company. 

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Watch the replay of the announcement, where Gadget founders, Mohammad Hashemi and Harry Brundage explore and demo some of the changes.