Show HN: I built a free, simple login service. Would you use this?

It isn't necessarily any worse for public/cafe computers. Just like any login system, the UI should have the ability to remember you or not.

With the browser acting as your user agent, it can manage multiple contexts (work, personal) and let you choose which is sent to each site, without the need for separate browsers for each.

As an added tangent, consider that browsers are one of the few places where we can do things like "temporarily log me out of everything" (Incognito Mode / Private Browsing). They have some level of sophistication in session management already.

absolutely not, never. it's one of the worst ideas ever.

why would i give you the email address of all my accounts, and the ability to spoof them, for something that is trivial to build myself?

It's a fun project, and kudos for shipping something at all!

My honest feedback:

There are already a host of services that do authentication, and a host of services that do payment and subscription management, and the leaders in each of those spaces are actually quite good. Loginland currently sits in the middle - it's not the best authentication system, nor is it the best payment system. It's just a little bit of both.

So, how do you combine the individual value of those services into something that is distinctly valuable? An interesting example in this space is fast.co. I have no idea if they will ultimately be successful or not. However, they verticalized specifically to e-commerce and combined login + checkout to a single step that is significantly easier/faster for the customer than a conventional checkout process. The pitch to the seller is: higher conversion rate, meaning more revenue (and we can potentially reduce fraud in the process). Among other things, they do this by opting for a fixed-time instant cancellation window after the order, rather than putting up a confirmation page beforehand. They use the strength of the identity system to streamline the checkout process, which is a unique merging of those two things that provides real value. There's also not much downside, as the traditional e-commerce customer doesn't associate much value with customer identities in the same way that a SaaS platform might. As it currently sits, I don't see that value unlock for loginland, so it feels like a mushy middle position.

Another direction here is thinking through how media is monetized. Right now, most major news publication (NYTimes, Washington Post, BBC, etc) have login and identity management mostly for managing subscriptions to news content (the identity itself isn't a ton of value to these companies). I believe there is probably a business that can be built around offloading identity and payment for these companies (customer has a relationship with loginland, loginland can get me into Washington Post content in a single click). Helping news companies shift more of their revenue from ads-based to consumption based or recurring would be huge. This business may already exists in several forms (I personally know a founder that started one which ultimately did not work out), but is another example of a vertical play.

In short, as you navigate next steps for this product, I'd advise you to keep an eye on where your customers will really get value from you. Streamlining identity management or checkout might not have as much of a conversion lift for SaaS as it would for other industries where purchase intent is lower. Look first for those, and see how you can best help them. Don't get discouraged by the comments here, though. Often times tiny tweaks make all the difference between success and failure.

This is actually a really cool idea. I think the people who are saying they don’t want to inject a 3rd party in the middle of their business are missing the point or are working on projects large enough that this doesn’t make sense.

A 5-7% overall fee (once stripe’s fees are taken into account) could make sense for a lot of small businesses that don’t want to manage this stuff, although I feel realistically you could reduce your fee significantly for larger customers.

The fee structure also starts to make a lot more sense if the focus is less on login, and more about making it really easy to monetize your product (different subscription tiers, gating features, pricing suggestions, funnel analysis, a landing page generator, etc).

Regardless I’ve built side projects before that still have lots of daily active users that I never monetized because I couldn’t be bothered to do all the payment and subscription integration work.

If I could start a new project today and know that I have:

1) User management (auth, password reset, etc) which is tedious to reimplement 2) Payments

Working from day one that’s a very enticing idea, although you’ll need to build faith that your service is reliable and will be around for a long time to get people to start using it.

My email is in my bio, feel free to reach out, I’d love to chat about it a bit more.

I'm currently building a kind of game website that needs a login system.

I like the idea of going passwordless and just checking an email and clicking a button. That seems low friction. I like that you don't require a credit card from me. I also don't expect to charge users ever so I like that the service would be free.

On the other hand, my hope in building my current project is that I'll show it some people and they'll enjoy it and I'll keep working on it and more people will keep using it etc. If that does happen I'd want complete control over the login system and I'd hate to be in a situation where I couldn't make changes to the system (or remove your component) because my users were already logging in via loginland.

For example, I imagine a future where people love my game it's taking off, but there are problems with your service. If I replace it, I have to figure out a way to preserve the accounts and logins of current users while simultaneously giving a good experience to future users. It seems easier to just do a minimal login system on my own now and improve it as needed.

Finally, if I were in a money making venture, I'd have the same concerns plus I'd realize the cost of 5% is probably disproportionate to the savings - which would be having to implement a very well understood solution.