I work at Clerk - same opinion here. Rolling your own auth is a trap. It's super easy when you are just getting started with your product and I cannot count how many times I have seen developers boast about how they rolled their own auth and now they aren't "locked in" to a vendor and are saving tons of money etc.
But the truth is, if you scale up as a company, it will end up costing you more in engineering salaries to re-create and maintain all the auth features you will need to support like @mooreds mentioned above than just using an auth library/vendor in the first place. And if you don't scale up, you are unlikely to push outside of the cheap or free tiers of any auth vendor you do go with, so it's a wash. Every reputable auth vendor has a pretty generous free tier.
It feels scary to go this direction because what happens if you blow up and then it becomes ultra expensive and now you're "locked in". All the time I see developers put hundreds of thousands, or millions of MAU into an auth vendor's pricing calc then gawk over the projected monthly bill and decide to roll their own. But the reality is that this doesn't happen. By the time you have that many MAU, you're typically paying out many multiples of that in engineer salaries alone, and paying an auth vendor a fraction of a single engineer's salary to handle your auth is substantially better value than hiring a team to build and maintain your own from scratch.
We have churned our fair share of large company customers over the years, as has every other auth vendor. They have all been because they needed feature we didn't have, not because the price was too high.
Clerk employee here - it's certainly the case that a lot of our users are JS ecosystem users, which is why those SDKs have received extra attention. That being said, I do want to note that we have greatly expanded the number of SDKs that we offer over the past year or so. I'm not sure which framework you were using when you tried it out, but we may have better support for it now! You can see all our supported SDKs if you scroll down in the docs: https://clerk.com/docs
Head of support at Clerk here, can confirm this is accurate. We're right at the finish line with a project that will give you a secure export of your full user data through the dashboard without needing to email support as well.
We are very committed internally to making sure that folks using Clerk are doing so because they want to be, not because we have made it difficult to leave.
Vercel is fairly clear about where it runs your code - depending on the type of page/deployment its going to be either S3, Lambda, or a cloudflare edge worker. There is a ton of logic behind how deployments work but the general benefit of using a service like Vercel is basically exactly as described above -- you push your code and it just works and you don't worry about it.
This is an attractive prospect for a lot of folks who want to spend their time making their apps better and not building/monitoring infrastructure. However, there are some folks who really like to build and maintain their own infra and in that case a service like Vercel might not be the best fit.
We have been using datocms heavily at my company for a variety of projects, and have been beyond impressed by how robust and well-thought-out the platform is, and how responsive the staff are to bugs and feature requests. I spend a LOT of time evaluating headless CMS' as part of my job, and Dato is a standout option - one that I recommend as a top choice to anyone who asks, and as an inspiration when I speak with reps from other companies building headless cms'. To be clear I am not employed by or have any partnership with dato at all, just a big fan of their work : )
You can't make a comment like this with absolutely zero explanation other than that it was 'your impression'. I understand the whole refuting bullshit is a lot of work thing, but it's equally as irresponsible, if not more, to make a comment like this with no evidence for a claim. At least give us something!
So just a question and this probably is stupid. But what to investors expect to gain from an investment into a nonprofit? Are the expecting to get their money back somehow? Are they expecting to get more than the money they invested back, and if so where would that come from? Or is it basically equivalent to a large charitable donation they are making, where none of their investments will ever come back to them in monetary form?
I have spent a long time thinking about and looking for ways that people use to rationalize their own spending and not giving to those who are in need, and this is one of the most common reasons cited. While all my research and experience has led me to the same conclusion, that it's a bullshit psychological defense, when it comes down to it I lack enough hard scientific evidence that this is the case to really solidly prove it.
The article you posted is great, thank you for sharing. It's clean, well-written, and backed by an experiment, which is fantastic. Do you have any more material like this? On the other hand, does anyone who disagrees have any material to the contrary?
Just jumping in here to back you up jpmoral. In fact, I said in my original comment that I am not trying to tell anyone how to spend money and its these peoples' own lives and they can do what they want, right in the last paragraph. So I hope nobody was offended here.
On the other hand, the first reply above actually answers the question. Notice that, while cloaked as a rebuttal to my initial comment, it was actually a string of defenses as to how the author rationalizes spending money for himself, others, or both, which was precisely what I asked for. Let's take a look at the points made:
- I earned this money so I can spend it how I want
- I should not hold back on spending money because it's my personal freedom
- Do you give away 100% of your money? If not, you are no better than me so who are you to suggest this?
- We have tried to solve worldwide poverty problems and failed many times, so it won't make a difference if I donate
- The money I spend on luxurious things is helping society as it creates jobs and trickles down the supply chain, so anything I spend is actually good for the world
- It's none of your business how I spend my money
Pretty decent answer actually, when it comes down to it. The answer is simply that people come up with a relatively consistent number of ways that they can rationalize themselves spending excessively, and from these rationalizations build their psychological defense. In fact, many of the points in his answer are exactly the same as the ones from the quora threads linked in my edit above.
Now, my next question is whether any of these defenses are valid. My preliminary research indicates that a resounding "no" is the answer, however, I'm going to continue researching and do a separate writeup on this topic, as it's fairly extensive. If anyone from here is interested at all let me know on twitter or something (@jescalan) and I'll link you when it's done. This thread is fairly buried by now though so I assume not.
Read the beginning of the article, was mildly interested. Kept reading about how he arbitrarily decided to book a helicopter ride and buy an expensive motorcycle through a texting service just to test it out, and was no longer sure if it was honestly a troll or not. Came here to see the comments, apparently was not a troll. Wow.
So the question I have here is, was he aware of how outrageously douchey this article comes off with the examples being off the cuff entirely over-the-top money blowing that he apparently regularly indulges in, or are rich people so in their own world that they don't even realize how normal people live and that writing something like this comes off as absurd to most people?
And another question that comes to mind too. He tried to make a startup that solved a similar problem a while ago, and mentioned this in the article. Are rich people seeking further conveniences for their already rather convenient lives entirely blind to the range of problems middle or lower class people deal with? Do they not care about these types of people and their problems because it simply not relevant to them?
I know this sounds very accusing of rich people, and while I am always personally a little shocked to see money squandered carelessly while so much suffering happens in the world, I honestly do not have anything against these people at all. Everyone has their own path in life and can and should make their own choices as they see fit. I am just honestly curious how it is rationalized, and the thought process surrounding it for people like this.
Edit: Did some googling and turned up these two quora answers:
The answers given are essentially "they make excuses for themselves and set up situations that rationalize it, such as 'I deserve this' and 'I could never make enough of a difference', etc." I don't quite feel satisfied with this. I would like to hear an answer from a legitimately very rich person still just out of curiosity!
Do you honestly think most adults follow what the senate is doing? On top of that, do you think most adults follow what the senate is doing to the extent that they know the names of individual senators, and whether one is more or less distinguished than another?
This would be like me saying that due to X's long and distinguished career in tennis, most americans should know who they are. The problem is that most americans don't follow tennis at all, especially not to the extent that they are familiar with particular players, unless they are superstars that always have their name all over the news (I can think of two for which this might be the case). And senators seem to have their name in the prominent news less frequently than tennis stars, honestly.
Honestly, I'd be significantly more likely to know Snowden's name than the vice president. I feel like he made a major impact on society that will be written about in history books for years to come. If you don't follow politics closely, the vice president is simply not relevant. The only way you'd know their name is by remembering it from the last presidential campaign, where the his and the president's names were everywhere, or if a vice president happened to do something extraordinary, which if I'm not mistaken is not super common.
I hear people citing this specific stat all the time as a proof about how stupid or uninformed americans are, and every time I hear it it bothers me. Knowing the vice president's name is something that is neither useful nor relevant to most americans, and therefore not knowing it makes sense entirely. I honestly don't see how that makes them uninformed at all.
I feel like this is a perfect reason why this is a bad investment. Anyone who is still subscribed to AOL dialup is honestly probably a senior citizen or technology-illiterate. AOL is not even marketing their dialup service anymore. These people over time will slowly decline until those 2 million eventually hit zero. In fact, you can clearly see the nearly exponential downward trend right on the article you linked. This makes it a nice amount of basically free money for AOL currently, but an absolutely terrible investment for the future.
Woah, really impressive that he was able to guess the company. That seems super crazy to me. I guess I'd better check out SmugMug if it's that above and beyond!
This is absurd. Are you serious? The way you express your opinions is enormously important. It could easily be the difference between getting a raise and getting fired. Expressing your opinions in a way makes sense to other people and they take well to is the farthest thing from silly ever, it's like a #1 essential skill for life. On top of that, phrasing informs the message, and in this case I was not just complaining about the phrasing, I was also complaining about the outrageous statement being made.
For example, saying "React is the best way to build all apps no matter what" vs. saying "Compared to building native UIs with objective C, react-native made for a much smoother experience for me because of X Y and Z" are not only phrased differently, they are communicating different things. The first one is an absurd overarching dogma declaring every other app-building technology to be inferior to react with no backing whatsoever, and the second one is a useful and specific analysis of react in one situation compared to an alternative.
I can't figure out if you're trolling or not, honestly.
Look up the definition of the word "opinion" on google or a dictionary. Then look up the word "dogma". Then re-read my comment. Fair? It's not the opinion I'm objected to, it's the way of stating it.