logoalt Hacker News

Better Auth is joining Vercel

82 pointsby synctoday at 3:52 PM56 commentsview on HN

Comments

khurstoday at 4:04 PM

Reminder - KeyCloak was donated to CNCF so a safe choice

https://www.keycloak.org

https://www.cncf.io/blog/2023/04/11/keycloak-joins-cncf-as-a...

show 4 replies
bekacrutoday at 4:32 PM

Bereket Here

the team at Vercel has been my biggest inspiration and always reflected many of the reasons we started working on Better Auth. This would allow us to focus more on what made better-auth great in the first place It hasn't even been 2 years since we started but thank you everyone from the open-source community for helping us make an impact in short amount of time. There is a lot to do to improve on open source auth and im really excited to be back focusing full time on building

show 2 replies
bhoustontoday at 4:42 PM

Congrats BetterAuth! It was the system I was considering before I rolled my own auth system around the passwordless concepts of: OTP + Passkeys + Google login. It is quite nice and simple and I've ported it to 3 separate projects now just via LLM:

Talk: https://ben3d.ca/blog/passwordless-login-system

Live Demo: https://passwordless.ben3d.ca

Demo Code: https://github.com/bhouston/passwordless

If you are building a user system with a database already, adding passwordless auth is easy.

show 1 reply
magniotoday at 4:23 PM

I used Better Auth for my mobile app backend. It works okayish. My biggest complaints are the OpenAPI specification gets little care, as it mainly caters for JS frontend, and breaking changes in patch version are more common than most packages.

nightskitoday at 5:26 PM

Open source isn't really open any more. It's just pre-acquisition. I'm happy to the creators for their payday but honestly just happy I opted out of BetterAuth building my latest product.

show 2 replies
mariopttoday at 4:52 PM

So, it's just a matter of time until they destroy this project in favour of their cloud interests. Such a shame, it is (was) a nice open source project.

ndom91today at 5:17 PM

Congrats! Better auth still provides a grade A dev experience, even with all the plugins, integrations, and tons of things they support.

Best of luck over there!

jgeurtstoday at 5:02 PM

Bummed. Vercel is not a great steward of open source. Happy that Bereket got an exit, though.

bstsbtoday at 4:00 PM

can Vercel give any assurance that they won’t add a reliance on their closed-source cloud offering for the package? especially given their ownership of next-auth too

i really loved better-auth’s DX but the nature of their database adapters means it’s relatively easy to switch over to another provider/library

show 2 replies
mooredstoday at 4:10 PM

Congrats to Better Auth. I'm in the auth space and see all kinds of things.

Anything that makes it easier for developers to build secure applications is a win!

agrippanuxtoday at 4:13 PM

Uggggg I just implemented Better Auth for our new product - time to start looking for backup plans. I used to be a huge Vercel fanboy but everything they have done in the last few years turns into a complicated mess.

show 1 reply
RichardChutoday at 4:51 PM

Better Auth is great, I use it for all my projects. Congrats to the team!

sligtoday at 4:06 PM

Love better-auth, and congrats to the team!

ebeirnetoday at 4:15 PM

This is amazing although I would really like for them to explore filling the backend gaps. An acquisition of Trigger.dev or Inngest would be the obvious move and nobody would be surprised. Thoughts?

fnoeftoday at 4:28 PM

Ah, here we go again.

Glad I decided to roll my own auth rather then using some library. I had a feeling that eventually they will join Vercel.

show 1 reply
Raed667today at 4:00 PM

I was wondering when that would happen, it was meant to be since the beginning

mrcwinntoday at 3:59 PM

I nearly considered using them recently. So glad I dodged the bullet!

show 2 replies
mrcwinntoday at 5:06 PM

Keycloak is excellent.

whalesaladtoday at 4:12 PM

Auth is not hard to roll yourself. Crypto: don't do it. Auth? Easy peasy.

show 5 replies
zuzululutoday at 4:47 PM

im amused that people are still relying on third party for handling auth when you can roll your own now with LLMs

show 2 replies
huflungdungtoday at 4:11 PM

Better auth is an absolute dumpster fire codebase.