How I Built and Shipped a SaaS in a Weekend Using Cursor (Stack + Workflow)

Last weekend I shipped a tiny SaaS — landing page, auth, billing, a single useful feature, deployed and accepting Stripe payments — in roughly 18 hours of actual keyboard time. The unfair advantage was Cursor. This post is the exact stack and workflow, written down so anyone else can copy it.

Before we dive in: if you want to try this workflow yourself, Cursor with bonus credits is here — you'll need fast-request credits to keep the Agent flowing through a full weekend.

The constraint

I gave myself a rule: nothing on the project could take more than 90 minutes. If a step started crossing that threshold, I'd either cut scope or ask Cursor's Agent to do it differently. The weekend wasn't about engineering elegance — it was about whether modern AI tooling could compress a normal SaaS MVP into a 48-hour window.

The stack

• Next.js 15 with App Router
• Tailwind v4 for styling
• Supabase for Postgres + auth
• Stripe + checkout sessions for billing
• Resend for transactional email
• Vercel to host
• Cursor as the IDE, with Composer + Agent as the main driver

Boring stack on purpose. Every piece is something Cursor has seen a million times in its training data, which means the Agent's hit rate is high and the suggestions are idiomatic.

Friday night: scaffold + auth (3 hours)

I opened a fresh folder in Cursor and ran a single Composer prompt: "Scaffold a Next.js 15 App Router project with Tailwind v4, Supabase auth, and a basic dashboard route group behind auth. Include a login page, a logout flow, and a placeholder dashboard layout."

Cursor produced about 14 files. I reviewed the diffs (this is the part you don't skip — even at 11pm), accepted, and ran npm run dev. Worked first try. By midnight I had a working auth loop deployed to Vercel.

Want bonus credits to try this yourself? The Friday-night phase burns the most fast-requests, so having extra credits stacked helps.

Saturday morning: the actual product (5 hours)

This is the only part of the weekend that has to be project-specific. My SaaS was a tiny analytics tool for one specific use case, so I described the data model and the one core view in plain English to the Agent.

I gave Cursor's Composer this prompt:

"Inside the dashboard route group, add a new /projects route. Users can create projects, each project has a unique tracking key. Build the create-form, the list view, the detail page, and the ingestion endpoint. Use Supabase, server actions for mutations, and respect RLS."

One Composer run produced 9 files. I had to push back twice — once on a naming inconsistency, once because it forgot to add the RLS policy. Both fixes were 1-prompt corrections.

Saturday afternoon: billing (3 hours)

Stripe is the part of every SaaS that used to eat an entire weekend on its own. With Cursor:

"Add Stripe checkout for two plans (monthly + annual). Webhook handler at /api/stripe, store subscription status on the user row in Supabase. Gate the /projects route behind an active subscription."

This produced ~7 files and the webhook handler was 90% correct on the first pass. I had to manually fix the STRIPE_WEBHOOK_SECRET env wiring (the Agent guessed a name and I needed it to match Vercel). Otherwise: clean.

Sunday: polish + ship (4 hours)

Landing page, SEO metadata, error states, the empty state on the dashboard, OG image, email-on-signup via Resend. Each of these is a 10–30 minute Agent task. None of them are interesting individually, which is exactly why having an agent that can knock them out one after another matters.

By Sunday 9pm I had a working SaaS live, accepting payments, with one paying user (myself, testing) and the codebase clean enough that I'd be willing to keep building on it next weekend.

The workflow lessons

1. One Composer prompt = one feature. Don't try to do "scaffold + auth + billing + dashboard" in a single prompt. Cursor can handle big tasks but the diff review cost goes up exponentially. Smaller prompts = faster reviews = faster shipping.
2. Always read the diff before accepting. Even at 1am. Especially at 1am. Catching a wrong env var name during diff review takes 5 seconds. Catching it during a Vercel deploy takes 20 minutes.
3. Use a .cursorrules file for your conventions. "Use server actions, not API routes, for mutations." "All UI uses Tailwind, no CSS modules." Tiny rules file, big consistency win.
4. Keep your repo deployable from minute one. Push to Vercel after the Friday-night scaffold. Then every change is one git push from production. The "deploy on Sunday" antipattern is how weekend projects die.

Could you do this with another editor?

Probably, but slower. The thing Cursor does well is the loop: describe → diff → review → commit, repeated dozens of times across a weekend. Plain Copilot can scaffold a feature, but the multi-file diff review UX is what makes the loop sustainable for 18 hours.

Start your weekend SaaS here — you get bonus credits at signup and 50% off your first Pro month, which is more than enough to ship a real MVP.