As someone who uses Django which has user management out of the box, why would I use a service like this?
[deleted]
Show HN: Clerk – all of user management as-a-service, not just authentication
21–30 of 234 posts
Re: Show HN: Clerk – all of user management as-a-service, not just authentication
#22As someone who uses Django which has user management out of the box, why would I use a service like this?
Django does not have this feature-set out of the box, that's for sure.
Re: Show HN: Clerk – all of user management as-a-service, not just authentication
#23For potential users in Europe, is there any documentation on GDPR-related questions somewhere?
Downvoted? Why? When user-related information is outsourced, the GDPR is absolutely relevant. Even the Google(!) screenshot on the landing page shows "Privacy and personalization" as the first item, that goes to show...
Re: Show HN: Clerk – all of user management as-a-service, not just authentication
#24Is the User schema[1] extensible? Can I add custom attributes or metadata to my users?
Re: Show HN: Clerk – all of user management as-a-service, not just authentication
#25I'm even hesitant to trust Auth0 for this, why would I trust a new company?
This is my question as well. It's an honest question and hopefully someone can educate me. Why would anyone trust a third party with what is the most important asset, their users? Thank you in advance.
Hey, Braden one of the founders. It's a good question, and a question that gets asked a lot. Out of curiosity would you trust a more established company like Auth0 or Firebase? We hope to gain developers trust over time, and we want to build a tool that makes it dramatically easier to build out session management, and a lot of these user flows.
A similar question that was asked only a few (10?) years ago, was "why would I trust a third party with my credit card data?" And now it's something that people don't think twice about, because of all the regulatory challenges around storing credit cards, and how bad a breach is.
We see auth, and more generically, basic user data, as a corollary to that. With User Data regulations popping up in different countries (GDPR/CCPA), in the next 5-10yrs, we think it will become pretty common place to use a service to offload some of these gnarly responsibilities.
Re: Show HN: Clerk – all of user management as-a-service, not just authentication
#26I'm even hesitant to trust Auth0 for this, why would I trust a new company?
This is my question as well. It's an honest question and hopefully someone can educate me. Why would anyone trust a third party with what is the most important asset, their users? Thank you in advance.
I can answer with the opposite question. Why would you trust your homemade solution instead of heavily invested experts? Auth0 (and Okta and a thousand others) do nothing but auth and customer management and do it at 1000X the scale as most enterprises. They do it way better than your IT team could possibly do it. And support every cutting edge feature and potential use case. You can also get them to absorb indemnity for damages in case of a breach rather than absorbing the cost yourself. From my POV, you'd be nuts to try to own your own passwords if you're securing anything remotely valuable.
Re: Show HN: Clerk – all of user management as-a-service, not just authentication
#27As someone who uses Django which has user management out of the box, why would I use a service like this?
I think Django has by far the best story here, so much built in or activated with simple plugins. It took us an hour to add 2FA.
On the other hand, looking at node.js it's really a dumpster fire[1]. Even when using passport, you are still back to writing the code to compare passwords at which point so much can go wrong. So there's a lot of scope for hosted services. This of course compounds the problem because those service providers are GREAT at SEO and content marketing, so now a lot of Google hits on nodejs auth end up recommending Auth0 &friends.
[1] https://medium.com/hackernoon/your-node-js-authentication-tu...
Re: Show HN: Clerk – all of user management as-a-service, not just authentication
#28For potential users in Europe, is there any documentation on GDPR-related questions somewhere?
Downvoted? Why? When user-related information is outsourced, the GDPR is absolutely relevant. Even the Google(!) screenshot on the landing page shows "Privacy and personalization" as the first item, that goes to show...
Braden, one of the founders, I gave you an upvote! GDPR is definitely at the top of our mind.
We would love to make it so developers don't need to think about, or make it easy to think about, GDPR and CCPA, and any future regulations that come up.
Re: Show HN: Clerk – all of user management as-a-service, not just authentication
#29As someone who uses Django which has user management out of the box, why would I use a service like this?
"Batteries included" Django is a no brainer for a lot of use cases. True. But clerk.dev seems to be targeting teams that use (javascript) microframeworks. They are building something people want and the pricing seems to scale well up to 100K users. If you have millions of users, I'm sure their enterprise team will give better deals than $0.05 / MAUs.
Re: Show HN: Clerk – all of user management as-a-service, not just authentication
#30I'm even hesitant to trust Auth0 for this, why would I trust a new company?
This is my question as well. It's an honest question and hopefully someone can educate me. Why would anyone trust a third party with what is the most important asset, their users? Thank you in advance.
Most of the auth platforms I've used allow ways for you to migrate users off of their platform. You'd want to make sure at minimum you have their email address, but worse case scenario you'd require all users do a password reset essentially when you switch to the new auth provider. That's a horrible experience--but it's still an option. Better options actually allow you to migrate the user over as they login. You'd need to keep the "old" auth service around for a while though until you close the door on migrating.
There's also an argument to be made that companies like this could (certainly not guaranteed) employ security experts and have better implementations (through libraries) as a result. Those implementations could (if updated appropriately), yield a more secure auth solution. In that regard, going with a third party, who has expertise, could be "better".
Also, unless you're going to host your database that stores user data on prem, you're likely trusting a cloud with it.
If I missed the point of your question I'm sorry. Did my best to answer. I have no relation to any of these services, other than I've used some at times throughout my career.