Val Town replaced Clerk with Better Auth after years of rate limit footguns, outages, and a forced two-users-table architecture that broke their social platform.
Key Takeaways
Clerk’s model assumes users only see their own data; social sites like Val Town need a real users table, forcing a fragile webhook sync and split authority over user state.
Clerk’s session refresh path made it a single point of failure: Clerk downtime made the whole site unusable, not just login. Uptime has been near two-nines since May 2025.
Better Auth runs entirely in Val Town’s own infrastructure; their paid “Infrastructure” tier is stateless and uninvolved in session management, eliminating the vendor-uptime dependency.
A two-week parallel-auth transition (accepting both Clerk and Better Auth cookies simultaneously) let users migrate passively. LLM assistance made the parallel path feasible on a small team.
Better Auth’s dashboard works via an API plugin on Val Town’s own domain, so all user data stays in their database.
Hacker News Comment Review
Commenters broadly agreed the Clerk model is fine for simple, non-social frontend apps but dangerous when session refresh becomes a dependency on third-party uptime, a risk confirmed by real CloudFlare/Auth0 cascade failures described in replies.
The library-vs-service distinction dominated discussion: Better Auth as a library means no external availability dependency, while any auth-as-a-service (Clerk, Auth0, WorkOS) multiplies your outage surface. The math is multiplicative, not additive.
Several builders noted they avoided the problem entirely by self-hosting auth with Lucia or rolling minimal custom sessions, arguing the security complexity is overstated and the week of learning pays off long-term.
Notable Comments
@bekacru: Better Auth’s founder confirms the project started to solve this exact problem personally before becoming a company.
@gordonhart: Concrete cascade failure example: a CloudFlare outage bricked an app for hours because Auth0 public keys for JWT verification were served behind CloudFlare.
