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

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 347 posts

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

#321

Post by brokenwren »

It's always great to see new companies trying to improve on this problem. I'm the CEO of FusionAuth and we've been working on our product for 6 years now. I can attest to the complexity and challenges that exist in this industry. Our belief is that no one should be building auth anymore.

You should connect with Mike over at Gluu. He's a great guy and very supportive of the industry as a whole. I'm also happy to connect with you all as well.

Steer clear of Auth0, OneLogin and the others. They don't play fair and I'm positive you'll be receiving your first cease and desist letters in the coming weeks. We have stacks of them and their claims are always total BS. But you don't want to go to battle with a company that has $300M in the bank.

Congrats on the launch!

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

#322

Post by robotdan »

lmcnearney wrote: post #118
Scotrix wrote: 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.

I would be careful depending on Keycloak given what happened with CentOS recently: - https://www.gluu.org/blog/keycloak-is-the-next-centos/

I hope IBM/Red Hat have more sense than this, but time will tell. It may not make sense for them to maintain Keycloak with all of IBMs identity solutions.

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

#323

Post by sebmellen »

brokenwren wrote: post #321

It's always great to see new companies trying to improve on this problem. I'm the CEO of FusionAuth and we've been working on our product for 6 years now. I can attest to the complexity and challenges that exist in this industry. Our belief is that no one should be building auth anymore. You should connect with Mike over at Gluu. He's a great guy and very supportive of the industry as a whole. I'm also happy to conne…

You've done great stuff with FusionAuth! I ended up using ORY [0] at my startup as we had slightly different auth needs, but FusionAuth was a top contender.

It's strange to me that Auth0 has so much market dominance. Are they a case of VCs subsidizing a subpar product, combined with aggressive (and bordering on false) marketing, or do they really have some unique product? Their pricing seems ridiculous to me; I can't imagine someone doing an analysis between Auth0 and alternatives, and choosing Auth0.

But seeing Atlassian switch to them made me think I may be missing something... It would be interesting to hear your analysis of why Auth0 is so prevalent!

[0]: https://www.ory.sh/

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

#324

Post by meatpuppeting »

corytheboyd wrote: post #69

I know most people are not like this, but I don’t mind setting up auth “over and over” It’s always a chance to read about what’s changed in the technologies/ideas you usually lean on for it. Apply that simplification that you wish you could have for your already launched application. Maybe you have a need to make your auth slightly more proprietary. If you churn out applications all the time yeah I get why this could…

Usually what happens to me on side stuff, is I spend so much time on the basic setting up auth and other things that are done over and over.......I burn out and never actually make the business logic of the app lol.

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

#325

Post by protoduction »

merlinsbrain wrote: post #258
protoduction wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The pricing is listed on the website, but it's about 10-20% of that. You would pay around 0.50 per 1000 emails. Depending on how often your users sign in and how long you keep them logged in for the the percentage may be lower or higher.

Not offering SAML/SSO/OIDC etc simplifies the problem a lot allowing me to offer it cheaply. The largest cost is sending the e-mails reliably, for which I am wrapping Amazon SES.

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

#326

Post by merlinsbrain »

protoduction wrote: post #325
merlinsbrain wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The pricing is listed on the website, but it's about 10-20% of that. You would pay around 0.50 per 1000 emails. Depending on how often your users sign in and how long you keep them logged in for the the percentage may be lower or higher. Not offering SAML/SSO/OIDC etc simplifies the problem a lot allowing me to offer it cheaply. The largest cost is sending the e-mails reliably, for which I am wrapping Amazon SES.

I’m not very vested in a solution at the moment, but if I had a set of users That being said, I can imagine there are people who would prefer a per sign in model, it’s just a level of granularity I don’t care for.

Good luck!

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

#327

Post by rubicon33 »

anonytrary wrote: post #218
leesalminen wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m building a MVP to show off and validate some ideas. I’m using Firebase and set up auth with my react app in about 10 minutes. I’d never spend a week on auth for a MVP.

I was talking about rolling you own email/password auth from scratch. I keep hearing about Firebase and how easy it is. Is that like AWS Cognito? Does it have custom branding or is it a drop-in form? Can it be hooked to your own SQL database?

It's far easier than AWS Cognito. Yes, I've used both.

Firebase auth is as easy as it gets for auth. Want Username/Pass? Just enable it. Want Google, Twitter, Firebase, Apple, Github, etc.? Just enable it, and write the handlers.

Want to hook into your own SQL database? Easy. Set up a firebase listener, that handles the auth event, and write whatever you want (username, auth details) to SQL.

This is a 100% solved problem and Firebase does a superb job it it.

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

#329

Post by anonytrary »

rubicon33 wrote: post #327
anonytrary wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was talking about rolling you own email/password auth from scratch. I keep hearing about Firebase and how easy it is. Is that like AWS Cognito? Does it have custom branding or is it a drop-in form? Can it be hooked to your own SQL database?

It's far easier than AWS Cognito. Yes, I've used both. Firebase auth is as easy as it gets for auth. Want Username/Pass? Just enable it. Want Google, Twitter, Firebase, Apple, Github, etc.? Just enable it, and write the handlers. Want to hook into your own SQL database? Easy. Set up a firebase listener, that handles the auth event, and write whatever you want (username, auth details) to SQL. This is a 100% solved pro…

Awesome, this is great to know. I'll have to consider it for my next side project. Unfortunately I just finished rolling my own, so... :)
Post reply on HN