Discontinuing Support for Clef | Hacker News Reader

Discontinuing Support for Clef

blog.getclef.com

14 pointsnl58748 comments

They have been providing two-factor authentication for websites either as a plugin to existing frameworks like WordPress or through API.

The users will have to drop everything and scramble to get a stable working login within the next 3 month, not counting the accounts migration that needs to happen. Poor ppl.

Seems to be a successful product with plenty of happy paying customers and no real competitor. Looks like killing a golden egg laying goose. Why would it be shut down so abruptly? The customers at least deserve a reason.

There are a couple of competitors out there. Tozny (https://tozny.com/secure-login/) and LaunchKey (https://launchkey.com/) both offer similar solutions. Both also offer APIs for integration with other products and ship WordPress plugins (for anyone who needs that particular integration).

So there are options out there, and 3 months is plenty of time to migrate accounts that need to migrate (I'm sure either of these, and any other companies offering alternatives, would be happy to help anyone making a change).

I assume they have been either been bought out to remove them from competition or they are closing it down to merge it into something else - either way it sucks all round but I guess that's business!

I'd hate to be the people scrambling to get the 2FA changed

Well, that was sudden. No post-mortem? I thought Clef's whole thing was transparency/company culture/etc.

> Our team will be joining another company, which we’ll have more news about in the next few weeks.

Sounds like some kind of acquisition or merger, with a promise of a future update. In other words, there will be a post-mortem, but they were alerting everyone to the coming death of the product and the services it depends on as soon as possible.

For being a security product that businesses depend on shutting down with a three month notice seems horrible. A lot of people will have to scramble to build their own auth system now instead of focusing on the things they should be focusing on.

It'd be fine given a year to do this, but three months? Harsh.

That's true, but there is precedent: Balanced gave a 90-day period for moving off its platform before shutting down.[1]

[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2015/03/13/balanced-is-closing-its-ma...

There's also Unloq: https://unloq.io/. Wordpress plugin page: https://wordpress.org/plugins/unloq/. It offers 3 MFA options, transaction authorisation and encrypts all data in transit and at rest with users' personal encryption keys. Plus, if you lose your phone or laptop, you can do a remote logout or device deactivation and your info is safe. It's free up to 100 users/ account, and it's an inexpensive alternative to Clef.

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