When you need a frontend foundation, the market gives you three paths. Only one of them ages well.
About Rivetous
We build production-ready frontend foundations for early-stage and scaling SaaS teams. Typically a CTO or technical co-founder with a product to ship and no time to build the foundations from scratch.
Option 1 - DIY with AI tools
Claude Code, Cursor, v0. Fast to start, genuinely impressive for prototypes. The tools aren't the problem - the oversight is. AI agents can't make the architectural decisions that determine whether your codebase still makes sense in six months. Unguided, they produce velocity that compounds into technical debt.
Option 2 - A generic starter kit
TurboStarter, ShipFast, and their contemporaries sell features: Stripe is wired up, OpenAI is wired up, three auth providers are wired up. You pay for a bloated monorepo built for everyone, then spend the first two weeks deleting the parts that don't apply to you.
Option 3 - Rivetous
Purpose-built architecture for your specific product, delivered as a structured sprint. Strict TypeScript, a bespoke design system entirely in your brand, modular components documented in Storybook, and a codebase your team can confidently extend - starting on day one.
The Rivetous difference
| Generic Starters | Rivetous | |
|---|---|---|
| Codebase | One-size-fits-all, built for everyone | Lean, purpose-built for your platform |
| Design | Pre-built templates that look like every other SaaS | Bespoke design system entirely in your brand |
| Maintenance | Trapped inside someone else's decisions | Modular, documented architecture built to evolve |
| Support | A Discord channel or an AI chatbot | Direct human collaboration and technical oversight |
The Stack
Every package is built on a proven, opinionated stack. These choices are deliberate - optimised for long-term maintainability, not for demo impressiveness.
Modern & Type-Safe
React with strict TypeScript throughout. Industry-standard build tooling and utility-first CSS. No compromises on type safety - predictable data properties and strict linting from the start.
Component Architecture
Headless UI primitives for accessibility and flexibility, with a systematic approach to variant styling and composition. Documented in Storybook - your team inherits a living component reference, not a mystery codebase.
Testing & Quality
Comprehensive testing setup including unit, integration, and end-to-end testing. Modern linting and formatting toolchain. Clean, semantic, and highly performant component structures.
Detailed technical specifications are shared during the initial onboarding meeting.
Chief Riveter
Rivetous (RIV-it-uhs — rivet + -ous) is run by Alex McNeill, a design engineering specialist with 20+ years building production web applications. The name is deliberate: in industrial engineering, rivets are the joints — the strongest part of any structure. That is what we build. The foundations your team iterates on with confidence.
Projects that started fast ended slow, handovers left teams stranded, and codebases that looked fine at launch became liabilities six months later. Rivetous exists to fix that. Fixed scope, fixed price, documented to production standard, and built to be handed over properly.
Every package we sell, we have built for ourselves first. The Rivetous Foundation powers this marketing site and the Rivetous Showcase (available to view during your onboarding call). We are customer zero. If something is not production-ready enough for our own products, it does not ship to yours.
We use AI coding agents as pairing partners. They help us move fast. What they cannot do is replace the architectural judgment that comes from years of production experience, so every line of code is reviewed before it ships. AI-assisted delivery. Human-reviewed architecture. That is the combination you get.
Ready to work with a team that builds for keeps?
Book an onboarding slot and let's discuss what your frontend foundation should look like.
Get in touch