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Of course! You don't need to be a Rails expert. In fact, the RailsFast quickstart starts from zero, without any assumptions about what your current knowledge about Ruby on Rails is. With that being said, as with everything in life, the more experience you have, the more value you will extract from it. AI writes very good Rails code, especially if you give it good context as we do in RailsFast, so odds are you'll do just fine. RailsFast is designed so you can get started with minimal technical knowledge, with the help of AI assisted coding. I believe you’ll quickly get the hang of it.

Yes! I believe RailsFast is a great learning tool. Through the docs, we'll take a very hands-on approach to start developing web applications, so this is a great way to get your hands dirty, and you'll learn by doing. On top of that, RailsFast sticks to the Rails standards (Rails omakase), so what you learn will be immediately valuable and transferable to any other Rails project you may work on.

I'll be honest: ideally, yes – at least to some degree. You should know the basics. You may get away with pure vibe coding (letting the AI write all the code without you checking anything), but I don't think that will lead to the best results. To be a good manager, you need to know what you're doing: that applies to AI-assisted coding and to every other job in life. There's nothing worse than being managed by someone who's clueless, so imagine how difficult it must be for an AI to follow orders of someone who keeps giving contradictory commands. I suggest you browse the RailsFast docs before purchasing to see if you're comfortable with the level of technical jargon used. You should be familiar with things like Git, ssh, and running terminal commands -- but you can (and should!) use AI to get up to speed if you don’t know what something means! I truly believe the barrier of entry is the lowest it's ever been, and you can learn 80% of what you need in a couple weeks thanks to AI. This is not specific to RailsFast, by the way, any other AI-first coding platform claiming you can build entire products with zero coding knowledge is outright lying to you. The technology is not quite there yet.

Yes! Check it out at railsfast.com/docs – it's quite thorough and it has a 15-minute quickstart that will leave you with an app already fully working in production!

Of course! You can build any kind of app, hobby project, web experience, B2C or B2B product you can think of! You can even build an iOS and Android app with the same RailsFast codebase if you use Hotwire Native!

Of course! RailsFast apps look and feel like any other modern SaaS. RailsFast uses Stimulus and Hotwire / Turbo (Rails-native technologies) to achieve interactive, dynamic experiences with minimal code! It truly feels like magic the first time you use it, especially if you come from React and the like, where everything is super verbose and covoluted. In any case, you can use any JavaScript library together with RailsFast, so you can build with the same level of interactivity with the tools you're more comfortable with!

Everything! RailsFast integrates with Stripe for payment processing, so we support both one-time payments and recurring subscriptions.

Yes! RailsFast is a living, breathing template by design, because it’s the exact same template I use for my own projects. In fact, I’m currently dogfooding it to myself by building new apps with it, and I’m updating it as I go, so you'll get updates as I build new stuff too. And since this is the exact stack I use for my own products, I made it easy to upgrade, so RailsFast will remain maintainable as your business grows.

Yes! First of all, the docs have extensive tutorials with videos to walk you through the whole process from 0 to deployed, onboarding, adding a feature etc. If you come across any problem, just reply to your RailsFast purchase email for support.

No. Most stores don't accept returns on digital goods, for good reason. Why? Well, because of the very nature of the product: you may purchase it, ask for a refund, and you'll always still keep a copy by default. I have no way of knowing whether you asked for a refund for a legit reason or with the intent of tricking me and getting the product for free. For that reason, all RailsFast sales are final. We cannot accept any returns on RailsFast: once purchased, it cannot be refunded. With that being said: if you truly had a problem and you really think you should get a refund, write to the support email and I'll evaluate it on a case by case basis, but the default answer is: no, there are no refunds.

Yes, and you have no idea how much this can scale on just a single server. I built PromptHero on the same stack, and it did 4M monthly visitors just fine: it ran on one single machine until several thousands of users a day, and I mainly just had to put the database on its own separate server to make it scale further. The total cost of running all the infrastructure was $120/mo. The technology RailsFast uses scales just fine. Other startups running on Ruby on Rails (not RailsFast) like Shopify have scaled the stack up to millions of requests per second. You'll run out of customers long before you run out of scaling capacity.

Yes! For UI, RailsFast uses Tailwind, which the AI excels at. You will be able to create entire pages in minutes, beautifully designed. Still to this day I get surprised how good the AI is at writing Tailwind screens over plain CSS or Bootstrap, for example. For interactivity, RailsFast uses Stimulus + Hotwire, both of which are very straightforward and well-documented. RailsFast links to their latest docs, and the AI does a fantastic job at writing clean, elegant, interactive components with it.

Yes, but! RailsFast uses JavaScript like any other website out there. You can use whatever frontend tool, library or framework you want along with RailsFast: React, Vue, Next, Nuxt, Svelte, Inertia – whatever you want. You can add anything, but I believe you won't need to: Rails ships by default with Hotwire and Stimulus, the recommended way of writing frontend for Rails apps. I really, really, really encourage you to try it. You can do everything a React/Vue/Svelte app can do, but with minimal JavaScript code. It feels like magic. The AI will glide through interfaces written with Hotwire + Stimulus because there’s so much less code to write and understand. But of course nothing is stopping you from adding more JS libraries: just pin them in the importmaps file and you're ready to go.

Not really, you're pretty much done after the 15 min quickstart. Yes, 15 minutes is all it takes to get started. That leaves you with an already hardened server, fully configured and ready for production workloads. To give you an idea: in the last ~year I never had to do any server-specific maintenance work. Docker handles all the difficult stuff for you under the scenes, so your app can essentially run wherever Docker can run. And if you want to upgrade your server, or just tear ir down and put it up again from scratch, or if you need to deploy elsewhere, you can just go over the 15-minute quickstart again and you'll have your app deployed in production again. This doesn't mean you should be completely hands-off about servers: of course, the more competent you are the most you will take advantage of your infrastructure, and the better you will be at managing a server – but the current baseline minimal requirements for running a VPS are pretty low, if not non-existent. And AI is extremely good at figuring out any server problem you may come across, so you'll be able to do anything you may have to do in your server while the AI holds your hand the entire time.

You can customize everything in RailsFast, including the components that make up the UI template! You can (and will!) tailor RailsFast to your own needs. But just so that we're on the same page: RailsFast is not just a front-end template, it’s an entire full-stack system. The frontend is just the tip of the iceberg, what’s really important is all the weight RailsFast is lifting for you behind the scenes. I suggest forgetting about the frontend for a minute: don't go for other template just because you like their design better, you can ask the AI to copy you any design with Tailwind in a matter of minutes. I'd argue the design of RailsFast, while sufficient, is the least relevant thing. AI can can redesign any screen easily however you want: have Cursor or Claude change any component for you, or bring and use your own Tailwind components you have from another project. I made RailsFast frontend components to allow you to put together pages faster, but what's important here is the entire full-stack system. You can swap the front cover any time.

RailsFast doesn't lock you in to anything. I make recommendations of services or technologies that work well with RailsFast and that you will probably like using. For example, I recommend deploying RailsFast apps to Hetzner, because the price and quality of their servers is just unbeatable. But if you don't like Hetzner for servers, you can switch to DigitalOcean, Linode or AWS at any moment. I recommend sticking to the defaults I outline in the docs, but there's nothing stopping you from changing anything at any point.