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Sick of spending time on Auth, we built an open source 'Stripe for Auth'

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Re: Sick of spending time on Auth, we built an open source 'Stripe for Auth'

#251
post #91

> A great alternative to Auth0, Firebase Auth and AWS Cognito Can you elaborate a bit on how it's a great alternative, or what is different?

Indeed I’ve chosen each of the above for different projects. I’d really like to know what is different, specifically, about this product.

They have a feature matrix here: https://supertokens.io/pricing

It's at a pretty coarse level of detail, but maybe it will help?

Re: Sick of spending time on Auth, we built an open source 'Stripe for Auth'

#252
post #188

For my little web app I just went with passwordless logins and did the "magic token sent to the inbox" thing. I no longer have to deal with passwords at all; a security breach is (mostly) useless in terms of mining creds; and all of the password handling workflows are now the email provider's problem. If someone loses access to an email account then I can use manual processes to verify the person and change the email…

Another bonus with magic links. In my experience people pay waaaay more attention to their email accounts than they do to almost any other authentication system they interact with. So chances are higher that they'll have a secure password, rotate their password, maybe even have MFA. (I said higher, but I didn't say likely ;) .)

Anyway, I think for certain kinds of applications this is a fantastic auth solution.

The only possible downside is that you've introduced a dependency on mail deliverability into a core piece of your application. But email deliverability may be a big enough issue that you want it solved anyway.

Re: Sick of spending time on Auth, we built an open source 'Stripe for Auth'

#253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an alternative...I wonder if there could be a auth process where the user creates a writeable 'space' for a site/app with a one time key in their password manager, gives the site/app the key, then the site uploads new login credentials directly into the password manager.

You mean like FIDO?

Eh, yes. Thank you. =)

Re: Sick of spending time on Auth, we built an open source 'Stripe for Auth'

#254
Great initiative! As someone who has worked on Auth systems multiple times, I can so much relate to it. In fact, at one of the jobs I created something quite generic (SSO by SSO, multiple token types, multiple interfaces (including OAuth), multiple password backends, email domain specific verification methods, etc. Wanted to open source it, but then given it was related to security and we were not really a security company, we let go of that plan.

All the best to you and your team!

Re: Sick of spending time on Auth, we built an open source 'Stripe for Auth'

#255
post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For anything I use with any kind of regularity I’d hate it. I already have this problem with services that decide they really need to send me some code by email because they don’t recognize my device (because it’s been more than 30 days and Safari killed their cookies). And then every once in a while the email doesn’t show up for 45 minutes for some reason, leaving me with no recourse. But for certain things that I n…

> For anything I use with any kind of regularity I’d hate it. I already have this problem with services that decide they really need to send me some code by email because they don’t recognize my device (because it’s been more than 30 days and Safari killed their cookies). And then every once in a while the email doesn’t show up for 45 minutes for some reason, leaving me with no recourse. It's incredible to me how imp…

> I'm really glad I decided to meditate and learn to be a more patient person.

A friendly nudge: google 'spiritual ego trap' and then read this comment again.

Re: Sick of spending time on Auth, we built an open source 'Stripe for Auth'

#256
post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to do this on a recent project because Corporate IT departments sometimes flag anything that has a create account / login prompt with a password field. Once you get on their shitlist it can take months of fighting the red tape machine to get off of it again. So we bypassed that with passwordless login using email. Unrelated, but we also discovered that one corporate had some kind of batshit crazy network where…

> We changed how our sessions work to get around it In other words, you fixed the bugs in how your original implementation relied on bad assumptions that it shouldn't have tried to rely on to begin with. The only real quibble here might be that duplicate requests cost you unnecessary transit.

[deleted]

Re: Sick of spending time on Auth, we built an open source 'Stripe for Auth'

#257
post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For anything I use with any kind of regularity I’d hate it. I already have this problem with services that decide they really need to send me some code by email because they don’t recognize my device (because it’s been more than 30 days and Safari killed their cookies). And then every once in a while the email doesn’t show up for 45 minutes for some reason, leaving me with no recourse. It's incredible to me how imp…

> I'm really glad I decided to meditate and learn to be a more patient person. A friendly nudge: google 'spiritual ego trap' and then read this comment again.

I don't believe that's required.

I'm not saying I'm better than anyone else, I'm simply pointing out that having now slowed down and become more patient, I don't complain when accessing information from the other side of the planet takes 3 minutes instead of 3 seconds.

That is what this essentially boils down to: convenience and patience. We're losing the latter because of the former.

Re: Sick of spending time on Auth, we built an open source 'Stripe for Auth'

#258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

isn't that the same as https://magic.link ?

The base idea is the same yes, but the pricing and featureset are different. Magic.link is venture funded with steep pricing per user. This makes sense for their enterprise target market, but for a hobby project I can't remotely afford it. They keep a record for you of your users, in my product that's your own responsibility (which imo is a good thing). tldr: What I'm building is simpler, and much more affordable, bu…

What would your pricing be? Starter pack at $35/month for 500 users sounds like $35/month and I outsource auth to a company that is also on the hook for “enterprise” security :)

I think it’s awesome you’re building an alternative with a different feature set, I’m really curious to hear your take on pricing.

Re: Sick of spending time on Auth, we built an open source 'Stripe for Auth'

#259
post #8

We’re using Keycloak.org which is a great product, easy to use, a lot of functionality (if you want to), deplorable “on-premise” and does offer everything what you expect from modern user authentication and management system. You should check that out, user auth is indeed a solved problem.

Keycloak is not my favorite thing - it's unnecessarily esoteric and complicated IMO - but I agree it does do pretty much what this is listening.

Re: Sick of spending time on Auth, we built an open source 'Stripe for Auth'

#260
post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm really glad I decided to meditate and learn to be a more patient person. A friendly nudge: google 'spiritual ego trap' and then read this comment again.

I don't believe that's required. I'm not saying I'm better than anyone else, I'm simply pointing out that having now slowed down and become more patient, I don't complain when accessing information from the other side of the planet takes 3 minutes instead of 3 seconds. That is what this essentially boils down to: convenience and patience. We're losing the latter because of the former.

You may want to work on your phrasing then, because that was sure the way it came off. You say that culturally we’re a certain way and then that you feel that you’re a better person for being different.
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