Research entry
Building DjangoShip with Claude
26 March 2026 · 2 min read
I extracted the reusable parts of a Django job board into a SaaS boilerplate for European developers. Here's what that process actually looked like.
A few months ago I was starting yet another side project and copying the same auth/Stripe/email boilerplate from my main project for the third time.
So I stopped and extracted it.
The result is DjangoShip - a Django 5.2 SaaS boilerplate aimed at European developers. €249, delivered as a GitHub template repo.
What’s in it
The standard stuff: email + OAuth auth, Stripe subscriptions and one-off payments, team management with invites and roles, API token auth with scopes and audit logging, a blog, Railway deployment config.
The less standard stuff: GDPR tools. If you’re building for European users you legally need a cookie banner that actually blocks analytics until the user consents, a way for users to download all their data (GDPR Article 15), a documented account deletion process, and retention limits on your logs. Most Django boilerplates ignore all of this. DjangoShip ships it all wired up.
How I built it with Claude
I’ve been using Claude Code heavily for the past few months and DjangoShip is the clearest example of what that workflow looks like in practice.
The process was roughly:
Audit first. Before writing a line, I ran a full comparison of what RoleUp (my job board) had vs. what a production-ready boilerplate needs. Claude helped surface gaps I’d missed - things like the GDPR export being incomplete, the cookie banner not actually blocking analytics, stub privacy policies with no legal substance.
Spec, then plan, then implement. For anything non-trivial I’d write a spec doc first, then generate an implementation plan with explicit TDD steps, then execute it using subagents - fresh Claude instances per task, with spec compliance and code quality reviews after each one. Slower than just asking Claude to “do the thing”, but the output is much more reliable.
The boring stuff got done. The GDPR module alone - proper data export, deletion audit logging, retention management commands, real privacy and cookie policy templates - would have taken me a full day to research and implement carefully. With this workflow it was a few hours, all tested.
The automation side was also Claude-assisted: I needed a webhook so that when someone buys on Gumroad, they automatically get added to the private GitHub repo. That’s Cloudflare Tunnel + n8n + GitHub’s collaborator API - fiddly to wire up, done in an afternoon.
What I’d do differently
The GDPR piece probably should have been audited earlier. I launched the Gumroad listing saying “GDPR compliance built in” and then immediately did a proper audit and found gaps. Downgraded the claim to “GDPR tools built in” while I fixed it. Ship honest.
Is it any good?
I’ve been running a production Django app on this stack for over a year. The patterns are battle-tested. The GDPR module is adapted from what’s live on RoleUp today.
Whether it’s worth €249 to you depends entirely on how much you value not building auth and Stripe and cookie banners from scratch.