Comment by caleblloyd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by caleblloyd | Hacker News Reader

- Outsource authentication. Use Okta, Auth0, or the likes. Especially cheap for Enterprise SaaS apps where there will not be a lot of users.

- Use a first-party, well-known framework for the frontend. create-react-app, vue-cli, etc. They work well and have supported upgrade paths

- Setup a CI/CD pipeline and testing site early. This may be an upfront investment, but it will allow you to quickly iterate, have something to demonstrate, and easily launch your prod site when you're ready

- Other things I personally like are UI Framework for the frontend, ORM with migration support for the Backend, and Swagger with automatic client library generation. There's arguments for and against each of these but they help me devolop faster

I agree writing login, forgot password, two-factor auth, change password is a huge time suck. My fear of using a 3rd party such as Auth0 for such a critical part of your application is vendor dependency. I've been bitten badly by 3rd party companies shutting down, being acquired, or abandoned.

I hate to advocate for it, but AWS Cognito is laughably cheap and certainly not going anywhere. Big downside is that there isn't a way to export; you'd have to list all usernames and have every user reset their password. Not really helping with vendor dependency, unfortunately.

It takes a lot of sorting through terrible docs to understand, but user pools are OpenID Connect compliant. You get canned login/mfa/forgot ui's out of the box for every platform, and it's so cheap.

50k MAU with Cognito: free. [1]

50k MAU with Auth0: $850/mo. [2]

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/cognito/pricing/

[2] https://auth0.com/pricing

EDIT: Thinking about this post a bit, it doesn't really address your key concern of vendor lock-in and feels like a shill. My immediate gut reaction was "who cares if you're locked in, no way can you beat the price," and that isn't very constructive. I know on an intellectual level that history has taught us a lot of things about monopolies and entrenched players, but emotionally the visible price tag elicits a strong response. Maybe someday Teddy Roosevelt will rise from his grave and save us all.

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