Better Auth, by a self-taught Ethiopian dev, raises $5M from Peak XV, YC

"Better Auth’s pitch is simple: Let developers implement everything from simple authentication flows to enterprise-grade systems directly on their databases and embed it all on the back end."

Its absolutely bonkers to me that web development has gotten to a point where this is a novel pitch. Up until not that long ago ALL auth was done directly in your own database and embeded in your own backend. Am I missing something?

Yeah and it was terrible. Your password would be stored as an unsalted MD5 hash if you were lucky.

Enterprise customers did the math on what a security breach lawsuit could cost and started demanding verifiably decent security, which meant some off-the-shelf off-premises solution.

That’s basically where we are now, and it’s the reason that most of Better Auth’s users are early-stage startups — they need to scale quickly, and they don’t have many pesky enterprise/governmental customers who might want to see a certification.

What are you talking about?

I was 14 learning PHP in 2003 and every tutorial insisted you salt and use a more secure hashing algorithm.

It’s weird to see people say things so boldly that are so wrong.