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Launch HN: Stack Auth (YC S24) – An Open-Source Auth0/Clerk Alternative

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Re: Launch HN: Stack Auth (YC S24) – An Open-Source Auth0/Clerk Alternative

#11

Post by esafak »

n2d4 wrote: post #10
esafak wrote: post #8

I'd suggest preparing a comparison table on the home page, at least against open source competitors, to help prospects decide. You emphasize completeness (authz + authn), and simplicity here: The dominant player in this space is Auth0, who appeals to enterprises but lags behind in developer-friendliness and has strong vendor lock-in. A newer one is Clerk, which markets directly to devs, but is still entirely propriet…

Appreciate the feedback! We have the following in our GitHub README, which we should probably copy to our frontpage: > # How is this different from X? > > Ask yourself about X: > > - Is X open-source? > > - Is X developer-friendly, well-documented, and lets you get started in minutes? > > - Besides authentication, does X also do authorization and user management (see feature list below)? > > If you answered "no" to a…

If you want to be developer friendly, create examples for as many languages as you can, and include them in the documentation, and as GitHub repos. Don't say "it's REST, DIY!"

Re: Launch HN: Stack Auth (YC S24) – An Open-Source Auth0/Clerk Alternative

#12

Post by n2d4 »

candiddevmike wrote: post #4

I don't think your differentiators are enough for folks to pull the trigger on something like this. There are a ton of folks in the space--supabase, supertokens, ory to name a few, not including the cloud providers who offer this service as well--how do you differentiate yourself from them?

Supabase Auth: We do much more than them — e-mails, organizations, permissions & RBAC, user dashboard, impersonation are some of the features we have. (I like Supabase a lot as a DB — we're working on some fancy connectors to use Stack Auth alongside Supabase RLS, so you can get the best of both worlds.)

Supertokens, Ory: Developer-friendliness and integrations, mostly (both of these target enterprise customers). Also, Supertokens is open-core. I'd say we're to Supertokens/Ory what Clerk is to Auth0.

Re: Launch HN: Stack Auth (YC S24) – An Open-Source Auth0/Clerk Alternative

#13

Post by kamikazeturtles »

Auth is the biggest headache of starting a new project. From your Github README, this looks pretty awesome!

My site is a golang static site with a few pages as a reactjs spa. Do you guys planning on adding support for the general stack using something like the new web components API?

I'd change the name. The last time I saw a legit site with a hyphen in its name was probably early 2010s. It doesn't engender trust.

Re: Launch HN: Stack Auth (YC S24) – An Open-Source Auth0/Clerk Alternative

#14

Post by n2d4 »

kamikazeturtles wrote: post #13

Auth is the biggest headache of starting a new project. From your Github README, this looks pretty awesome! My site is a golang static site with a few pages as a reactjs spa. Do you guys planning on adding support for the general stack using something like the new web components API? I'd change the name. The last time I saw a legit site with a hyphen in its name was probably early 2010s. It doesn't engender trust.

Unfortunately, Web Components are still somewhat immature [1], but eventually, our plan is to support vanilla React as well. We really want to nail every single integration that we officially support before growing horizontally, because looking at some of our competitors, often its greatest failures come from rushing framework support.

So, we went with the most popular JS framework first (Next.js), and are gonna go from there once we're confident in it.

[1] https://dev.to/richharris/why-i-don-t-use-web-components-2ci...

Re: Launch HN: Stack Auth (YC S24) – An Open-Source Auth0/Clerk Alternative

#16

Post by rudasn »

n2d4 wrote: post #10
esafak wrote: post #8

I'd suggest preparing a comparison table on the home page, at least against open source competitors, to help prospects decide. You emphasize completeness (authz + authn), and simplicity here: The dominant player in this space is Auth0, who appeals to enterprises but lags behind in developer-friendliness and has strong vendor lock-in. A newer one is Clerk, which markets directly to devs, but is still entirely propriet…

Appreciate the feedback! We have the following in our GitHub README, which we should probably copy to our frontpage: > # How is this different from X? > > Ask yourself about X: > > - Is X open-source? > > - Is X developer-friendly, well-documented, and lets you get started in minutes? > > - Besides authentication, does X also do authorization and user management (see feature list below)? > > If you answered "no" to a…

I think a comparison table here would be better for you here, considering your target audience and all.

Re: Launch HN: Stack Auth (YC S24) – An Open-Source Auth0/Clerk Alternative

#17

Post by n2d4 »

esafak wrote: post #11
n2d4 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Appreciate the feedback! We have the following in our GitHub README, which we should probably copy to our frontpage: > # How is this different from X? > > Ask yourself about X: > > - Is X open-source? > > - Is X developer-friendly, well-documented, and lets you get started in minutes? > > - Besides authentication, does X also do authorization and user management (see feature list below)? > > If you answered "no" to a…

If you want to be developer friendly, create examples for as many languages as you can, and include them in the documentation, and as GitHub repos. Don't say "it's REST, DIY!"

Noted, thanks. We're focussing on Next.js frontends right now — which is fairly well-documented — I hope to get some Python & Golang examples in there by the end of the week.

Re: Launch HN: Stack Auth (YC S24) – An Open-Source Auth0/Clerk Alternative

#18

Post by paulirwin »

Congrats on the launch! This looks great.

I see you plan on making money by charging for the hosted service. Given that, and given recent history in the industry with companies starting out with this model only to rug-pull it from users later and move to a more restrictive license, can you publicly commit to keeping the code MIT/AGPLv3-licensed into the future?

Re: Launch HN: Stack Auth (YC S24) – An Open-Source Auth0/Clerk Alternative

#19

Post by n2d4 »

codingwagie wrote: post #15

Auth doesnt need a new service/company. It needs an ai chatbot that walks engineers through adding auth to their project. Its the developer experience that is the problem

You might like what we built then — we have a setup wizard that adds auth to your Next.js project for you, including creating all the necessary pages, handlers, and config ;)

   npx @stackframe/init-stack@latest
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