GlassKit vs Meta's official toolkit
An honest comparison of GlassKit and Meta's official Web Apps toolkit for building Meta Ray-Ban Display apps: what each one is, and which to choose.
If you're building for the Meta Ray-Ban Display, there are two starting points worth knowing about: Meta's official Web Apps toolkit and GlassKit. They solve different problems. This page is an honest comparison so you can pick correctly.
The short answer
Meta's toolkit
Scaffolds a bare Web App. Free, official, the right call for a quick prototype or hobby project.
GlassKit
A production-grade fullstack starter. The right call when you're building a product with accounts, payments, and a real backend.
They're not mutually exclusive in spirit. GlassKit is what Meta's scaffold would look like if it were built for commercial launch.
What Meta's official toolkit is
Meta ships an AI-assisted toolkit: a plugin for Claude Code,
Cursor, Codex, and GitHub Copilot. You describe an app, and it
scaffolds index.html, styles.css, and app.js following the
display glasses design constraints. It includes a handful of skills
(create-webapp, add-screen, add-button, connect-api,
add-sensors) and a few example apps.
It is genuinely good at what it does: getting a single, simple Web App on the glasses fast. It is free and official.
What it does not include: authentication, payments, a database, a companion site, transactional email, a typed component system, or any of the commercial scaffolding a real product needs. That's by design: it's a scaffold, not a boilerplate.
What GlassKit is
GlassKit is a fullstack boilerplate: a pnpm + Turborepo monorepo with three workspaces:
app/: a Vite + React + TypeScript Web App with a typed<GlassViewport>primitive, the D-pad focus system, an additive-display design system, and sensor hookscompanion/: a Next.js companion site: marketing, Clerk sign-up, Stripe checkout, customer portal, account dashboardpackages/backend/: a shared Convex backend with Resend email and Stripe entitlement wired in
Plus six forkable AI templates that already pair an AI provider with a device capability: Wayfinder, Tour Guide, Running Coach, Sous-Chef, Presentation Coach, Trail Companion.
Side by side
| Meta's toolkit | GlassKit | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | $299 / $1,299 one-time |
| What you get | A scaffolded vanilla Web App | A 3-workspace fullstack monorepo |
| Glasses app | index.html + styles.css + app.js | Typed Vite + React app with primitives + hooks |
| Auth | None | Clerk, wired |
| Payments | None | Stripe checkout + portal, wired |
| Backend | None | Convex, shared |
| None | Resend, wired | |
| Companion site | None | Next.js marketing + dashboard |
| Templates | A few examples | 6 AI + device templates |
| TypeScript | No | Yes, strict, across all workspaces |
| Best for | Prototypes, hobby apps | Commercial products you ship and sell |
Which should you choose?
Choose Meta's toolkit if
You're prototyping, learning the platform, or building something small and personal. It's free and it's official, so there's no reason to pay for a hobby project.
Choose GlassKit if
You're building a product. The moment you need users to sign in, pay you, receive an email, or have their data persist, you need auth, payments, email, and a backend. Wiring those yourself is the "two identical weeks" every project starts with. GlassKit ships them done, and ships the companion site to sell the thing.
The honest framing: Meta's toolkit gets you to "it runs on the glasses." GlassKit gets you to "it's a business."
How to build a Meta Ray-Ban Display app
The complete guide to building, previewing, and shipping an app for Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses: the two SDK paths, the Web Apps constraints, and the deploy-to-glasses flow.
Meta Ray-Ban Display glossary
Plain-English definitions of the key Meta Ray-Ban Display terms: Neural Band, additive display, Web Apps, D-pad navigation, the 600×600 viewport, and more.