Comment by opportune | Hacker News Reader

Comment by opportune | Hacker News Reader

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Not yet, I’ll give it a look next time I hack on my site. “Stripe for auth” is exactly what I’m looking for, and I know I still have a lot of auth head bashing left before I ship.

I’ll say though, my personal “customer demographic” ATM is more along the lines of someone who wants to get working user signups and auth and then never think about it again - so mentioning SAML/OIDC building blocks is a bit of a turn off for me. The reason is that I’m a solo dev trying to ship a browser-based multiplayer game, which I assign a low (maybe 5%) probability of ever becoming something with multiple people working on/turning into a real business - so I need auth, but would prefer to spend as much time as possible on the game itself, and don’t have anybody to farm the work out to.

But I’m happy to give workos a shot to see if it makes my life easier.

WorkOS is pretty tailored to folks building B2B apps where individuals will later be part of a team. (Think Dropbox, Figma, Asana, etc.)

It's less of a fit for B2C products where user identity won't ever be associated with a company (like ecommerce, a game, or a dating app).

The reason is that B2C apps actually have pretty different needs in terms of user identity. For example, most consumer apps will optimize for faster/higher conversion during signup and less security.

But if WorkOS works for your use case, then you should definitely use it. Our free tier includes 1,000,000 MAUs, which is significantly higher than Auth0/Clerk/Stytch/etc. which start charging you around 10,000.

Disclosure: I work for FusionAuth, an auth provider with a free community option.

If I were in your shoes I'd probably use a library built into whatever framework you are using. Auth servers are powerful but are another architectural component you have to manage (even if it is a SaaS, there's still config to manage).

Not sure what you are building it in, but if I were building it in rails, I'd use devise. If JS, maybe nextauth or passport.js.

When you do this you have to accept certain risks (what if your user data gets breached, what if you want to add more functionality) but based on the little you've shared, I think a local solution is perfectly fine.

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