Launch HN: Better Auth (YC X25) – Authentication Framework for TypeScript

Summary

Hi HN! We’re Bereket and KinfeMichael of Better Auth (https://www.better-auth.com/), a comprehensive authentication framework for TypeScript that lets you implement everything from simple auth flows to enterprise-grade systems directly on your own database, embedded in your backend.To be clear—we’re not building a 3rd party auth service. Our goal is to make rolling your own auth so ridiculously easy that you’ll never need one.Here are some YouTube videos explaining how it works (we did make our own video but weren’t happy with it and these videos do a great job):https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFtufpaMcLM - a really good overviewhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QurjwJHCoHQ - also a good overview and dives a little deeper into the codehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKqHrE0KyeE - short and clearhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Atev8Nxpw7c - with TanStack frameworkhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6rP9d3RWo8 - a full-on 2 hour tutorialAuth has been a pain point for many developers in the TypeScript ecosystem for a while. Not because there aren’t options but because most fall into 2 buckets: (1) Third-party services like Auth0 which own your user data, lock you into a black-box solution and are often super expensive; or (2) open source libraries like NextAuth that cover the basics but leave you stitching your own solution together from there.For Better Auth. the kick off moment was building a web analytics platform and wanting to add an organization feature - things like workspaces, teams, members, and granular permissions. I assumed there’d be something out there I could plug in to NextAuth (the popular and kind of the only library), but there wasn’t. The only options were to build everything from scratch or switch to a 3rd party auth provider. I even tried hacking together a wrapper around NextAuth to support those features, but it was hacky. That’s when we decided to take a step back and build a proper auth library from the ground up with a plugin ecosystem that lets y...