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From Supabase to Clerk to Better Auth

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Re: From Supabase to Clerk to Better Auth

#41

Post by lioeters »

snide wrote: post #26

This is why I'm so thankful I went with Lucia early. They sort of sunset their library and replaced it with documentation (and some small utilities) for how to manage and host authentication for yourself. It's always presented as some big, scary thing you can't manage yourself, but I found that taking the week to learn how security and basic salting works, I was able to feel more confident about how everything worked…

https://lucia-auth.com/

I remember when they deprecated the library and instead made it a learning resource on implementing auth from scratch. Brilliant decision, much respect to the author.

Re: From Supabase to Clerk to Better Auth

#42

Post by BoppreH »

> A hard lesson you learn building a complex system is that its reliability is the minimum of the combined reliability of its critical parts.

It's worse than that, the combined availability is the product of all components in the critical path. If your software, the authentication layer, and the cloud provider each have 99% availability, and any one of them can bring your service down, then your final availability is just 97%. With eleven components like that you have zero nines of availability.

That's why reducing components and going for reliable solutions is so important. I'm happy that the team took this path.

Re: From Supabase to Clerk to Better Auth

#43

Post by therealpygon »

tornikeo wrote: post #35

Can someone more intelligent then me tell me why should I offload my postgres users table to some 3rd party provider? Like what is so hard about keeping that table in my VM on hetzner that I have to give it off to someone else? It's not payments, it's just a few fields of data

Why pay someone to build a house? I’m sure you could do it yourself…but that doesn’t mean that is the best use of your time in all cases. The analogy is basic but apt; not everyone needs or wants to run (or create) every mechanism. I don’t do all of my own hosting either and it’s not because I couldn’t, it’s that it isn’t worthwhile in my cases.

To expand a bit more: if a business is faced with a choice to save some money by increasing risk, having people who’s job it isn’t managing and supposedly securing that information, or to have a third-party who job is literally to handle and worry about those things, who carries independent insurance, and who is on the hook if they lose customer data, and in exchange the business is simply taking the risk of associating with business that could do a poor job — which of those options sounds more appealing from a business sense? It’s a lot easier to blame someone else than earn back trust for your own major mistakes because you tried to write your own software to save a little money.

That’s the SaaS value proposition.

Re: From Supabase to Clerk to Better Auth

#44

Post by awestroke »

mvkel wrote: post #37
tornikeo wrote: post #35

Can someone more intelligent then me tell me why should I offload my postgres users table to some 3rd party provider? Like what is so hard about keeping that table in my VM on hetzner that I have to give it off to someone else? It's not payments, it's just a few fields of data

Start any greenfield project, hand-coded auth takes up 50% of the development time of the entire MVP

It takes like an hour. So that's a quick mvp then

Re: From Supabase to Clerk to Better Auth

#45

Post by transitorykris »

awestroke wrote: post #44
mvkel wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Start any greenfield project, hand-coded auth takes up 50% of the development time of the entire MVP

It takes like an hour. So that's a quick mvp then

Social logins, email logins, password resets, multi-tenant, organizations, many to many users to organizations, etc etc. Not necessary for MVP, but can definitely be painful hacking in later if the MVP hits.

Re: From Supabase to Clerk to Better Auth

#46

Post by notatoad »

therealpygon wrote: post #43
tornikeo wrote: post #35

Can someone more intelligent then me tell me why should I offload my postgres users table to some 3rd party provider? Like what is so hard about keeping that table in my VM on hetzner that I have to give it off to someone else? It's not payments, it's just a few fields of data

Why pay someone to build a house? I’m sure you could do it yourself…but that doesn’t mean that is the best use of your time in all cases. The analogy is basic but apt; not everyone needs or wants to run (or create) every mechanism. I don’t do all of my own hosting either and it’s not because I couldn’t, it’s that it isn’t worthwhile in my cases. To expand a bit more: if a business is faced with a choice to save some…

>that doesn’t mean it’s the best use of your time in all cases

Okay, so… what are those cases? I’m also curious.

Re: From Supabase to Clerk to Better Auth

#47

Post by koliber »

transitorykris wrote: post #45
awestroke wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It takes like an hour. So that's a quick mvp then

Social logins, email logins, password resets, multi-tenant, organizations, many to many users to organizations, etc etc. Not necessary for MVP, but can definitely be painful hacking in later if the MVP hits.

What you are talking about is in a large part authentication. You can do authentication using an external service and still have your user table locally. You can also do authorization locally with a local session table while leaving authentication to a SaaS.

Re: From Supabase to Clerk to Better Auth

#48

Post by pietz »

therealpygon wrote: post #43
tornikeo wrote: post #35

Can someone more intelligent then me tell me why should I offload my postgres users table to some 3rd party provider? Like what is so hard about keeping that table in my VM on hetzner that I have to give it off to someone else? It's not payments, it's just a few fields of data

Why pay someone to build a house? I’m sure you could do it yourself…but that doesn’t mean that is the best use of your time in all cases. The analogy is basic but apt; not everyone needs or wants to run (or create) every mechanism. I don’t do all of my own hosting either and it’s not because I couldn’t, it’s that it isn’t worthwhile in my cases. To expand a bit more: if a business is faced with a choice to save some…

This comment is more ridiculous than ever in 2026.

Re: From Supabase to Clerk to Better Auth

#50

Post by skydhash »

Scarbutt wrote: post #12
giancarlostoro wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or I could use a web framework that offers that out of the box, and its free and lives in my database, wherever I want.

What framework offers all those auth features OOTB?

I remember Laravel with Socialite [0]. Laravel is what I usually reach for Web SaaS MVP. You only need a VPS and a managed database for testing out the market and can scale a lot without increasing expenses that much..

[0]: https://laravel.com/docs/13.x/socialite

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