Reclaiming Control: Why Val Town Switched to Better Auth

Val Town migrated from Clerk to Better Auth to resolve issues with rate-limiting and frequent service outages. The team found that Clerk's 'no users table' philosophy was incompatible with their social platform's need for high-frequency data access. By switching to Better Auth, Val Town regained control over its session management and eliminated a major single point of failure.

Key Points

Farming out your users table to a third-party service creates significant risks, including restrictive rate limits and data synchronization complexity.
Third-party session management makes your entire site's uptime dependent on the provider's reliability, creating a single point of failure.
Social platforms have unique requirements, such as the need to fetch data for many users simultaneously, which standard 'frontend-heavy' auth providers may not support well.
Better Auth was chosen for its open-source nature, framework integrations, and its ability to let Val Town manage its own data while still providing a modern developer experience.
The migration was facilitated by a two-week transitional period where both authentication methods were supported simultaneously.

Sentiment

The community overwhelmingly sided with Val Town's decision to move away from Clerk and toward a self-hosted solution. While there was genuine debate about whether to use a library like Better Auth versus fully rolling your own auth versus using a SaaS, the consensus leaned strongly toward maintaining control over auth data and infrastructure. Clerk received significant criticism from multiple users sharing negative firsthand experiences, and the broader sentiment reflected a growing backlash against auth-as-a-service in favor of open-source libraries and self-hosted solutions.

In Agreement

Clerk becoming a single point of failure is a real and serious problem — when it goes down, your entire app goes down, which is unacceptable for critical infrastructure like auth
Third-party auth services that own your users table create dangerous vendor lock-in and make migrations painful
Better Auth represents the right approach: an open-source library that stores data in your own database, giving you control without requiring you to build auth from scratch
The reliability math is clear — each additional critical dependency multiplies your failure probability, so reducing dependencies on external services improves overall uptime
Auth SaaS companies have overstated the difficulty of self-hosted auth to justify their business model, and the industry is now correcting back toward self-hosted solutions
LLMs helped make the migration feasible by enabling a parallel-running transition period supporting both auth systems simultaneously

Opposed

Auth is genuinely complex beyond simple password hashing — SSO, SAML, SCIM, OIDC, and enterprise integrations are real requirements that consume significant engineering time
Rolling your own auth introduces security risks: subtle bugs like TOTP bypasses, account lockout DoS vulnerabilities, and CSRF issues are common in homegrown systems
For resource-constrained startups, outsourcing auth to a SaaS lets you focus on core product differentiators rather than spending engineering time on undifferentiated infrastructure
Some large companies like Replit are actually adopting Clerk, suggesting it works well for many use cases despite the complaints
Self-hosting auth means becoming your own ops team, responsible for uptime, security patches, and incident response for a critical system