Advice: Better-Auth as a Backend noob?
So I've been working on developing an app for my church to use as a member portal. It's just me developing this app and I have very limited monetary resources. That's okay though because our church is also relatively small. Anyways, besides the point.
I have very little backend experience, but am somewhat experienced with frontend stuff.
I've setup Clerk for my app already (it's a Next.js app I've built over the last couple of weeks, I'm currently hosting on Vercel's free plan), but I'm beginning to regret my choice considering the limitations they place on free users (and there's absolutely no way that I would have the funds to pay for their paid plans.) (see above)
So, I'm wondering if setting up Better-Auth is realistic given my limited backend experience. I only barely understand how databases work, and I'm not great with API stuff. Is rolling my own Auth actually feasible? Should I try to live with Clerk? Switch to AuthKit (from WorkOS)? Try Auth0?
Looking for advice from anyone more experienced. (Or actually, preferably less experienced but having been in this situation lol)
3 Replies
AWS cognito and Azure B2C may be worth a look
They're both relatively easy to set up and very cheap (AWS cognito is free for 10k logins)
It's actually way better than Clerk. Clerk is terrible when it comes to customization. Better-Auth is also open source which is just great.
StackAuth + Neon has been my goto, if a relational database is needed on top of auth. Theo also make a comprehensive video covering the differences amongst the auth options — comes down to why you need it and how you are using it and plan to use it.