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Ask HN: Early B2B SaaS without features like SSO, OAuth login, etc.?

3 points babyent | 4 comments | 20 Oct 24 04:25 UTC | HN request time: 0.292s | source

Hi. I have been using email login and admin users can invite their colleagues by email address.

Of course, many established companies offer SSO, ability to login using Google, Apple, other oauth.

I asked around to my test users and a few potential users and they mentioned email is fine. In my own experience as a SWE I used many softwares at work which used just email login. However, many more offered a bunch more.

Will it be fine to open it up to broader audience without all these things?

1. smt88 ◴[20 Oct 24 05:07 UTC] No.41893000[source]▶
It's so cheap to use a SaaS auth provider like Auth0 or Clerk.dev that you might as well implement one of them. It should take less than a day.
replies(3): >>41893083 #>>41894474 #>>41897979 #
2. babyent ◴[20 Oct 24 05:24 UTC] No.41893083[source]▶
For sure. I'm already using Auth0, but their managed universal UI wasn't going to work with my invite process, as well as my overall user management system. So, I spent a couple days building custom UIs and hooking everything up so it works.

I guess if people ask for oauth, I can set it up later and just spend another day and test that everything works. And if they want SSO I'm not sure how that works so I'll have to research it anyway.

3. admissionsguy ◴[20 Oct 24 10:44 UTC] No.41894474[source]▶
Likely I am too old, but I completely don't get the idea of using an external service for authentication. Cynically, I have started to suspect that implementing basic mechanisms such as authentication is a lost art among programmers with short attention spans raised on social media and Skibidi Toilet. More charitably, is could be an issue of switching to a new technology every three years, so best practices for implementing this stuff don't have time to be developed.
4. iamflimflam1 ◴[20 Oct 24 19:46 UTC] No.41897979[source]▶
I would hardly call auth0 cheap. As soon as you need any real features (such as SSO) you will be on their enterprise plan…