From Supabase to Clerk to Better Auth

Posted by stevekrouse 22 hours ago

From Supabase to Clerk to Better Auth(blog.val.town)

274 points | 208 commentspage 5

Eli_EB 6 hours ago|

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pururvaagarwal 15 hours ago||

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anishksrini 21 hours ago||

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huflungdung 21 hours ago||

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dakolli 20 hours ago||

The homepage of val.town says "Zapier for know-code engineers".. Is KNOW-code engineer a term?

CharlesW 20 hours ago|

It's just a play on the phrase "no code".

Maybe you can help me out: I still have no idea what val.town is. I guess it's an alternative to Cloudflare Workers?

petemilly 16 hours ago|||

This comment thread was a nudge to push out a quick experimental change to the val.town landing page, so thank you. Very open to feedback on that messaging if anyone has any. Most customers these days ask about using val town with claude code, so you could also think of us as a deployment platform for vibe coded apps

dakolli 2 hours ago||

I wasn't trying to be negative. I think the changes you made to your landing page are more communicative than before, good luck with val.town.

petemilly 59 minutes ago||

Thanks! And btw I didn't perceive your comment as negative! More a helpful confirmation of what we've been thinking: "yeah, we have a messaging/positioning problem"

petemilly 16 hours ago||||

Hey, I work at Val Town, and we definitely struggle to describe what it is because the platform is so broad, but I'll try: a javascript code editor in the browser that auto-deploys that code to our servers whenever you edit a file. You can run code by clicking a button, on a cron, via HTTP. And there's other stuff like SQLite and blob storage

So yes, like Cloudflare Workers in some ways. Or like CodePen but fullstack. Or Replit. The val town "founding poem" was:

> If GitHub Gists could run,

> And AWS Lambda were fun

dakolli 20 hours ago|||

That's a good question, I was having a hard time figuring that out myself. They call themselves the "zapier" for developers. In reality it seems kinda like a FaaS but idk. They have a code intelligence product that seems like a FIM autocomplete. Very confusing product suite.

wg0 15 hours ago|

Never outsource your auth no matter what unless you're vibe coding and it doesn't matter. If that's the case, don't put auth in at all because it's just you anyway or just use vibe coded password lookups from database at that point.

Lastly - here's the law of mother nature:

Software funded by VCs will milk you and will milk you dry. Not now, not tomorrow maybe decade or two later when the hot potato being passed around reaches to the last party holding the bag that now needs its money back with all that others had their 10x returns already taken from them by soldng them at an inflated price to the last party holding the bag.

Clerk's pricing should be evidence enough.

skrtskrt 13 hours ago|

You can literally plug the Better Auth libraries into a little Node server and run it as a separate auth server for free, forever, same as if you used a Django or Rails deployment for that purpose.

That’s all it takes to not use their cloud at all.

wg0 9 hours ago||

I'm not talking about open source libraries.