Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Clerk – all of user management as-a-service, not just authentication

clerk.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 234 posts

Re: Show HN: Clerk – all of user management as-a-service, not just authentication

#51

Post by chickenpotpie »

new_guy wrote: post #42
tootie wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Authentication is webdev 101. If you can't roll your own you're in the wrong industry. I really can't think of any good reason to hand crucial control of a site over to any third party, much less user authentication where one breach will potentially cost you millions and land you in jail. The whole business model seems to revolve around being a crutch for people not capable or competent of running their own services.

> I really can't think of any good reason to hand crucial control of a site over to any third party, much less user authentication where one breach will potentially cost you millions and land you in jail.

Because Auth0 and other providers have security experts specializing in prevent hacking attempts and there is no way you can do a better job than them unless you make it your full time job.

Re: Show HN: Clerk – all of user management as-a-service, not just authentication

#53

Post by colinclerk »

colinmorelli wrote: post #38

What's the story around extensibility? I feel like it starts to get murky when the boundaries of data ownership are unclear. What if I have some bespoke user-level data that doesn't make sense for your system to store, but is massively important to my business (this feels to be the case for most products I build). Can customers extend your UI components? Do they store that data with you? One of the nice parts about a…

Hi Colin!

On your backend, Clerk gives you a stable User ID for each user. You're free to use it as a foreign key in your database as you normally would. (clerk.dev runs on clerk, and that's how we do it internally)

We only have a Node SDK so far - here's a guide on retrieving the User ID from your backend: https://backend-docs.clerk.dev/quick-starts/next.js-api-rout...

Soon we will launch a way to add custom attributes to the user object, as well as management of those attributes in the UI if desired. Things can get a bit murkier there, but those features will always only be opt-in.

Re: Show HN: Clerk – all of user management as-a-service, not just authentication

#54

Post by aidos »

tootie wrote: post #26
taytus wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Both of the services you mentioned have had major outages in the past. Maybe it’ll never happen again, but your customers don’t want to hear about why they can’t currently do business because some service they don’t even know about, in which you’re hosting their data, isn’t working.

As ever, there are trade offs and you take the good with the bad.

Re: Show HN: Clerk – all of user management as-a-service, not just authentication

#55

Post by kleiba »

bsid wrote: post #28
kleiba wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks, Braden!

Re: Show HN: Clerk – all of user management as-a-service, not just authentication

#56

Post by ukulele »

dubcanada wrote: post #3
colinclerk wrote: post #2

Hi HN - We couldn't be more excited to launch Clerk and help developers solve all of user management. It's been quite a journey to reach this point, with over a year of iteration on the developer experience before we found something developers love. Using Clerk will enable you to spend more time on your application, and less time worrying about the ever-growing list of user management concerns. Our team is listening…

Just wonder price wise, if I signed up for the free and then switched over to paid it would be $249 for 5000 MAU. Compared to say Auth0, which would be $114 for 5000 MAU. The only difference is profile, and Auth0 mostly covers it by allowing you to easily store metadata. I am not sure I understand what makes Clark worth 2x Auth0?

Just wait until you find Userfront, which does the same thing for free until 10k users

Re: Show HN: Clerk – all of user management as-a-service, not just authentication

#57

Post by catchmeifyoucan »

This is very promising! Going down this path now.

2 questions:

1. What happens if you go down? Then our users can’t auth in right?

2. I saw in one of the screenshots the ability to connect OAuth providers - will your service also store refresh tokens for these api services?

Re: Show HN: Clerk – all of user management as-a-service, not just authentication

#58

Post by ketzo »

f430 wrote: post #39
dubcanada wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another question, I don't see any mention of security. You are in complete control of our users/profiles and their login credentials and there is zero mention of how secure that data is.

I forget what this effect is called. Every once in a while a new service comes along that tries to compete with Amazon and there is a huge cost of entrusting the new entrant.

I think I've seen the term "trust moat" used before, which I like for describing this effect.

Re: Show HN: Clerk – all of user management as-a-service, not just authentication

#59

Post by taytus »

tootie wrote: post #26
taytus wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Because I'm a software engineer who has been building stuff like this for years...

Re: Show HN: Clerk – all of user management as-a-service, not just authentication

#60

Post by sofixa »

sschueller wrote: post #37
faeyanpiraat wrote: post #8

I'm even hesitant to trust Auth0 for this, why would I trust a new company?

Also, is this permitted under the GDPR?

As long as clerk.dev are compliant, and you make sure of that, yep, you can delegate them data and keep yourself in compliance.
Post reply on HN