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Show HN: Clerk – all of user management as-a-service, not just authentication
71–80 of 234 posts
Re: Show HN: Clerk – all of user management as-a-service, not just authentication
#72I'm waiting for SaaSaaS. SaaS as a service.
I would unironically buy this... probably 20% of my job is wrangling SaaS boilerplate.
Am I alone on this? Let's be honest, how much of the SaaS code you write could be applicable in any SaaS application?
Re: Show HN: Clerk – all of user management as-a-service, not just authentication
#73[deleted]
Re: Show HN: Clerk – all of user management as-a-service, not just authentication
#74Earlier 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…
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.
Outages occur all the time. What difference does it make where exactly they're originating from if the end result is the same, from the end user's POV? You give them the same message in either case: "we're experiencing a temporary outage and are working on a remediation." I suppose you'll also be compensated according to contract SLAs, and if the hypothetical becomes actual, you can tune your contract renewal based on your observed losses in revenue accordingly.
Best case scenario, there's healthy competition in the space, providing more alternatives and allowing you to end your contract with them if the service sucks. Worst case scenario I guess is that the company implodes taking all its data with it, affecting untold amounts of businesses. A GDPR-like regulation stipulating the ability to export that data (so, user databases) would go a long way towards mitigating prolonged outages in that worst case, and in the best case of the worst case, their competitors are able to import the exports. And/or tools that can spin up a $database instance in $cloud.
Re: Show HN: Clerk – all of user management as-a-service, not just authentication
#75This is great. Do you have plans to provide any native mobile (iOS/android) support?
Re: Show HN: Clerk – all of user management as-a-service, not just authentication
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
or, you could just do passwordless email auth and not have any security issues whatsoever.
Re: Show HN: Clerk – all of user management as-a-service, not just authentication
#77Few things I dont get:
- Who is your customer type ? Individual developers ? IT of companies ?
- What do you bring in addition to Google G Suite ?
- Why is that important to have beautiful UI ?
- Why would I use your service to power auth of my service, as it would probably take more time to integrate your apis, and configure your frontend to my branding than do it from scratch ?
Re: Show HN: Clerk – all of user management as-a-service, not just authentication
#78What startup is moving so fast they don’t even have time to write their own user management features and instead outsource it to a third party SaaS in perpetuity?
Re: Show HN: Clerk – all of user management as-a-service, not just authentication
#79The pricing model has me confused: 1) Pricing is free up to 5,000 MAU 2) But the next pricing grade starts at 1,000 MAU for $49/mo + $0.05/MAU additional so if you have 5,001 MAU you take a big leap from $0 to $249/mo Is there a reason for that huge bump? Why doesn't the first pay tier start at 5,000 MAU? And how is MAU even calculated? Like, aren't all users in the system active users? Or are you able to have a bunc…
Typically MAU means "users that logged at some point during that billing month".
That is, when you are billed based on MAU you don't pay for the number of users in your database, only for the ones that actually use your app/service/whatever.
Re: Show HN: Clerk – all of user management as-a-service, not just authentication
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think I've seen the term "trust moat" used before, which I like for describing this effect.
sort of like "economic moat"...yeah I can definitely see why AWS is quickly becoming a monopoly. 10 years ago? I might have used Clerk, I guess I'm not seeing what the value proposition here is to me its: Do I trust a new service or continue with one of the most trusted service from AWS?
Yeah, definitely. It's a phenomenal virtuous cycle for AWS.
I think that honestly, the biggest sell for a lot of newcomers is gonna be "you don't need to know AWS!" -- in my (very limited!) experience, if you want to do X with AWS, you're gonna need to learn how to do W, Y, Z, and maybe A and B with AWS too.