AgentShipKit vs the alternatives, honestly
Comparison pages usually exist to flatter the author. This one includes the cases where you should not buy from us — because a refund costs us more than the truth does.
| AgentShipKit | Vercel AI Chatbot | MakerKit / Supastarter / Shipped | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price (July 2026) | $79 once | Free (MIT-ish) | $249–$599 once |
| Tool-calling agent loop | ✓ multi-step, up to 8 steps | Basic tool support | Chat completion, mostly |
| Run traces users can debug | ✓ every tool call, live | ✗ | ✗ |
| Per-run quotas (free/pro gating) | ✓ race-safe, in Postgres | ✗ | Credits in some ($180+ tiers) |
| Payments wired | ✓ Polar, webhook-verified | ✗ none | ✓ Stripe (usually) |
| Auth + RLS | ✓ Supabase (Google) | ✓ Auth.js | ✓ |
| Multi-tenancy, teams, i18n, admin | ✗ deliberately not | ✗ | ✓ this is their strength |
| Codebase size to understand | ~50 files | Medium | Large (hundreds of files) |
When you should NOT buy AgentShipKit
- You want a chatbot, not an agent. Use the Vercel AI Chatbot. It's free, excellent, maintained by Vercel, and has 20k+ stars for a reason. Our own free kit is smaller and simpler than it.
- You're building a big, general SaaS — teams, roles, i18n, admin panels, hundreds of screens. Buy MakerKit or Supastarter. They've spent years on exactly that, and their $299 is fair for it.
- You need RAG / vector search today. Shipped ($249) includes a RAG pipeline; we don't yet.
When AgentShipKit is the right call
You're building a product where the AI does things— calls tools, runs multi-step tasks — and you want to charge for it. The parts that make that a business are exactly the parts the kits above skip: a tool-calling loop that streams its reasoning, run traces your users can open when the agent does something weird, per-run quotas enforced atomically in Postgres so the free tier can't be raced, and a payment webhook that can't be replayed into a double-grant. That slice — the agent-infrastructure slice — is all we do, in ~50 files you can read in an afternoon.
Prices checked July 2026. If a competitor changed theirs, tell us at hello@agentshipkit.com and we'll correct it.