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Comment by SkyPuncher | Hacker News Reader

It’s just a few fields until it’s not.

SSO, SAML, SCIM, OIDC, OAuth, 2FA, passwordless auth, verification tokens, etc etc, And, variations of each for wildly popular systems you’ll be expected to integrate with but don’t support the exact spec.

For a while at my company, half our support engineers time went to handling random SSO issues that came up in our home built auth system.

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I don’t know when we became this lazy. Auth is hard, sure, but putting your users table and sessions behind a vendor API is not something cool. Tell me one feature that is not supported by libraries like OpenIddict (You can build around) or Keycloak?

I think the main argument usually is time savings. Personally I just always do E-Mail and password auth, yea its old and not the shiny new thing, but it doesn't require me to integrate 200 different ways of doing auth.

We should be able to demand users remembering their passwords, I dont like to cater towards users who simply dont want to put in the work to use my product.

Will I lose potential users over this? Yes. Does it feel bad knowing I am in control and wont have to offload to 3rd party vendors? Hell no.

Same here, Just email + password, no google dependency initially. If more users ask we will think of it. but again you don't need a cloud vendor for all this.

That's great for B2C, but B2B demands SSO.

Not really, we do B2B. E-mail & password is good enough for our customers. They really really dont care about what kinda auth we use.

Great for you but that's not the case for a lot of B2B contracts we have. A lot of them require integrating with their SSO, not just for login but for permissions too

Do permissions follow the same model everywhere with SSO or do you now have to set up permission logic everywhere for new customers? Like company A uses "admin" as role while company B uses "management" for essentially the same role?

Depends on your industry I guess. My personal experience is that small-to-medium companies ask for SSO, large and enterprise _require_ it.

You do you but most businesses if given the option between supporting OAuth to reduce friction on signups, or only supporting password auth, will choose the option that makes them more money.

You don't have to use a 3rd party service for OAuth. You can do it in house.

Yea I know, I just don't want my app to have a google logo on it, or whatever other companies people use to login with. E-mail and password will forever be my go to solution.

I want intentional users not the ones that click "sign up with google", try out the app once and never come back. Also I don't have the time to learn how to properly integrate more auth methods into my app. I want my own user table, I want predictability on how a user model looks and I want to be in control of everything.

Well the disadvantage is that you're responsible for your companies keycloak.

Exactly. Do you want to become ops? Because that's how you become an ops team.

If you're a SaaS vendor, you want to make onboarding and logging in as easy as possible and being able to do things like add a "login with google/apple" button or other third party SAML/SSO tooling is one way to do that. Supporting that workflow sucks as it can involve very finicky integrations involving certificate trusts, etc.

Those authentication providers require you to do the same Google/Apple OAuth certificate configuration yourself, and you even have to pay the 99 euros for Apple.

SAML/SSO is indeed finicky, but the problematic part (mapping attributes) is often done by IT teams, ESPECIALLY if you use a third-party provider.

WorkOS has a built-in workflow for all the complex SAML/SCIM attribute mapping.

https://workos.com/docs/directory-sync/attributes

Also certificate renewal flows:

https://workos.com/changelog/certificate-renewal-flow

(I'm the founder.)

Not sure what laziness has to do with this. It’s all about tradeoffs.

Auth isn’t something I want to think about. There are a lot of hidden traps.

"home built auth system" is bound to have "random SSO issues". You fix them, that's how things mature.

I'm guessing they simply didnt want to spend the time and money doing that

Possibly didn’t want to accept the additional risk that comes with rolling your own auth as well.

Yep, it’s just a drag. It’s not our core product value so any effort we put into it is a drag.

Rather than just use an email solution Google built GMail into a massive email solution despite it not being a core product

Sometimes that's just an opportunity

> ... not being a core product

Technically true, because Google's core product is ads. Also fundamentally wrong, because Gmail serves as a massive source of ad targeting information, in addition to being a high-engagement canvas to display those ads.

Google has not been scanning gmail mails for ad targeting since 2017. I think after 9 years we can finally let that one go.

Ad display I'll still grant you of course.

I don't think we can let that one go so easily, since they might not be scanning for ad targeting (pinky promise?) - but they most certainly will slurp everything up for their AI stuff: https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/gmail/gm...

Sure, now it is.

It was an unproven long shot when they built it.

Supabase's auth is MIT licensed and OSS, is it not?

https://github.com/supabase/auth/blob/master/LICENSE

Supabase is OSS but it's a real pain to actually self host it

Couldn’t you get Claude to go into Supabase’s auth code and make your custom like their’s but adapted to your stack?

"Claude, make my custom like their's but adapted to my stack. Make no mistakes"

This is not funny because people are doing that for real.

Exhibit A, mi.

And don’t hallucinate.

You’ll have to drive the agent to do it, not a one-shot task. It’ll also require you to understand your codebase.

Is this perhaps a reason to have a Users table that is separate from the table of data on how you authenticate that user?

> For a while at my company, half our support engineers time went to handling random SSO issues that came up in our home built auth system.

fwiw, we also have entire staff dealing with SSO issues among our employees and users, despite relying on external services to handle auth.

A problem domain as complex as authentication is bound to habe issues of some sort. But I am not sure if I would be so fond of „outsourcing“ something as integral to my services as the access to these services

There is a trust component for sure, but a business requires assessing the value of time against revenue. I can say for our org that using an off the shelf solution like Clerk saves us time and money and we believe the risk is very small relative to the savings. Maybe the cost for you is not large right now, but when you've got 20 enterprise customers all asking for specific OIDC integrations configured with Private Link, custom domains, and private clusters, an auth solution starts looking mighty fine.

Just use Ory Kratos and self host it.

That’s when you install Keycloak.

is it just me? who just uses magic links delivered via email or telegram as backup?

Personally I hate magic links via email with a passion and will actively avoid products that have this as the only authentication method

Majority of apps are B2C apps, they don't need any of this.

All you need is Apple and Google Oauth.

It depends on your use case.

If you are a B2C app, you are probably more concerned about:

- social providers (Apple and Google being the big ones, but others could play a role--FB or Tiktok for example)

- easy registration (but not too easy, you want to avoid bot spam)

- self-service account management (updating profile fields, consents [CCPA, GDPR, others], resetting passwords

- single sign-on between your apps (if you have multiple)

- language support (for your backend, and mobile/web front end)

- cost

- possibly MFA, possibly passkeys

If you are just starting out its probably a good idea. Think about the use case when google bans either your app or bans your app user?

Then your business is entirely screwed anyway because you've just lost half the market

At least to me it sounded very much like they were talking about mobile.

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