Philosophy & layers

Mission

AI Starter is a product-agnostic foundation for SaaS apps that need organizations, credits, async AI runs, and a creative studio UX (boards, batch variants, gallery).

The platform investment stays reusable if a single vertical product fails.

Three repository layers


Product fork (e.g. ai-media-hub)
  fal catalog, regional payments, GTM
        ↓ fork from ai-starter
AI Starter (this repo)
  credits, generation, boards, chat shell
        ↓ merge starter/main
SaaS Starter
  auth, org, base billing, shell, RLS

Decision checklist

Question	If yes →
Auth, org shell, generic billing UI?	Upstream saas-starter, merge here
Credits, generation, boards, Edge pipeline?	This repo
fal-only GTM, video-first UX, one market?	Product fork

What does not belong here

Product-only GTM docs
Replacing Stripe adapters when billingProvider: 'custom' is enough
Provider SDKs inside libs/features-*

Canonical detail: docs/adr/0004-ai-starter-layer.md in the monorepo.