Our first module is user authentication. This is a messy space where you can roughly divide the current incumbents into at least one of three camps:
- Proprietary; with vendor lock-in and MAU-based pricing when you scale
- Basic feature set; missing things that would be useful especially in the first week, such as token-based auth, a user dashboard with analytics, frontend components, and well-supported credential authentication
- Bad DX; difficult setup and lots of initial configuration even for basic features (such as OAuth)
If you'd like to validate an idea you built on a Thursday evening, there are no great solutions available.
Enter Stack! An open-source and self-hostable authentication server and library. Besides basic auth features, I think there are three ways in which we do really well:
- Frontend integration: We provide React/Next.js components and hooks that are highly customizable. They adapt to your design system; so if you use eg. MUI, they will use MUI components, too.
- Dashboard and monitoring: We have a dashboard where you can list, visualize, and manage your users. You can also use our components to build your own.
- Modularity: Stack itself is an OpenID identity provider and has a RESTful API. If you're using a different OAuth client library, you can still use our server.
Stack itself is open-source licensed under MIT and AGPL. We provide a paid hosted service that we call Stackframe [1]. It has very simple pricing, with unlimited MAU on every paid plan. There are no differences between the hosted and the OS version.
Check out our docs [2], or if you'd like to be part of this, join our Discord [3]. Cheers!