A Ruby on Rails template for creating your own crowdfunding website, allowing you to collect pre-orders and payments.
Selfstarter is an open-source Ruby on Rails application that serves as a template for building custom crowdfunding websites. It allows projects to collect pre-orders and process payments independently, solving the need for an alternative to platforms like Kickstarter. The template is highly customizable, enabling creators to tailor the site to their specific product and campaign needs.
Developers, startups, or creators who want to run their own crowdfunding campaigns without relying on third-party platforms and have the technical ability to deploy and customize a Ruby on Rails application.
It provides full control over the crowdfunding process, including payment processing and customer data, while being free and open-source. Unlike proprietary platforms, it avoids fees and restrictions, offering a flexible, self-hosted solution that can be extended with additional features as needed.
Roll your own crowdfunding
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Product name, pricing, colors, and fonts can be easily modified via YAML and SCSS files (config/settings.yml and variables.css.scss), allowing rapid customization without deep code changes.
Uses Amazon Flexible Payments Service to collect multi-use tokens, enabling deferred charging until shipping—ideal for pre-order campaigns where fulfillment is delayed.
Includes a Procfile and clear deployment instructions for Heroku, simplifying production setup with database migration support.
Designed as a minimal starting point, it encourages developers to add features like authentication or analytics tailored to specific needs, as noted in the philosophy.
Lacks built-in authentication, administration panels, mailers, and analytics, requiring significant additional development effort for basic campaign management.
Primarily integrated with Amazon FPS; switching to Stripe or WePay requires custom implementation and code changes, as admitted in the contributing section.
The project has no tests, increasing the risk of bugs and maintenance challenges when customizing or extending the codebase.
Self Starter is an open-source alternative to the following products: