Why We Built a Self-Hosted Clerk Alternative (and Open-Sourced It)

Authentication is the first thing every web app needs and the last thing anyone wants to build from scratch. So we used Clerk. Then we used Auth0. Then we tried Supabase Auth. Each time, we ran into the same problems. This is the story of why we built Authon — a free, self-hosted authentication platform — and open-sourced it. The Problem with Hosted Auth 1. Pricing Scales Faster Than Revenue Clerk charges $0.02 per monthly active user beyond 10,000. Auth0's Essentials plan charges $0.07/MAU. At 50,000 users, you're looking at $800-3,500/month just for authentication. For a bootstrapped startup, that's painful. Authentication is infrastructure — it should scale with compute cost, not user count. Users Clerk Auth0 Authon 10,000 Free ~$700/mo Free 50,000 ~$825/mo ~$3,500/mo Free 100,000 ~$1,825/mo Custom Free 500,000 Custom Custom Free 2. Vendor Lock-in Is Real When your middleware imports @clerk/nextjs, your React components use <ClerkProvider>, and your API routes call clerkClient