Launch HN: Better Auth (YC X25) – Authentication Framework for TypeScript

To be clear—we’re not building a 3rd party auth service. Our goal is to make rolling your own auth so ridiculously easy that you’ll never need one.

Here are some YouTube videos explaining how it works (we did make our own video but weren’t happy with it and these videos do a great job):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFtufpaMcLM - a really good overview

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QurjwJHCoHQ - also a good overview and dives a little deeper into the code

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKqHrE0KyeE - short and clear

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Atev8Nxpw7c - with TanStack framework

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6rP9d3RWo8 - a full-on 2 hour tutorial

Auth has been a pain point for many developers in the TypeScript ecosystem for a while. Not because there aren’t options but because most fall into 2 buckets: (1) Third-party services like Auth0 which own your user data, lock you into a black-box solution and are often super expensive; or (2) open source libraries like NextAuth that cover the basics but leave you stitching your own solution together from there.

For Better Auth. the kick off moment was building a web analytics platform and wanting to add an organization feature - things like workspaces, teams, members, and granular permissions. I assumed there’d be something out there I could plug in to NextAuth (the popular and kind of the only library), but there wasn’t. The only options were to build everything from scratch or switch to a 3rd party auth provider. I even tried hacking together a wrapper around NextAuth to support those features, but it was hacky. That’s when we decided to take a step back and build a proper auth library from the ground up with a plugin ecosystem that lets you start simple and scale as needed. That frustration turned into Better Auth.

Better Auth lets you roll your own auth directly on your backend and database, with support for everything from simple auth flows to enterprise-grade systems without relying on 3rd party services.

It comes with built-in features for common auth flows, and you can extend it as needed through a plugin ecosystem whether that’s 2FA, passkeys, organizations, multi-session, SSO, or even billing integration with Stripe.

Unlike 3rd party auth providers, we’re just a library you install in your own project. It’s free forever, lives entirely in your codebase, and gives you full control. You get all the features you’d expect from something like Auth0 or Clerk plus even more through our plugin system, including things like billing integrations with Stripe or Polar. Most libraries stop at the basics but Better Auth is designed to scale with your needs while keeping things simple when you don’t need all the extras.

We’re currently building an infrastructure layer that works alongside the framework to offer features that are hard to deliver as just a library—e.g. an admin dashboard with user analytics, bot/fraud/abuse detection, secondary session storage, and more. This will be our commercial offering. For this, there’s a waitlist at https://www.better-auth.build. However, this is only optional infrastructure for teams that need these capabilities. The library is free and open source and will remain so.

We’d love your feedback!

About the dashboard - would this just be an interface to my existing Better Auth setup (e.g. if I had customized the underlying data storage) or are you hosting credentials yourself?

You have my sincerest gratitude for building this incredibly useful library and documenting it so well.

In the JavaScript/TypeScript ecosystem, libraries like NextAuth still have a huge number of users for the same reason: ease of use. And with the rise of full-stack TypeScript apps where both the frontend and backend live together and share a strong type system, it makes even more sense to keep all your context in one place.

That said, if you ever decide to self-host Better Auth in a dedicated container, you still can.

Back when I was looking at it a couple of months ago, the big thing that popped out was that BetterAuth supports email and password out of the box, where NextAuth seems to have a preachy disclaimer about how email and password is inherently insecure, so they leave you to your own devices to implement password hashing and the like.

That did give a sense that NextAuth was the first to dominate the space and feels as though they can dictate morals.

BetterAuth seems to be a bit more developer-focused.