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by masa331 1777 days ago
Building a sign-up/sign-in flows takes like a two hours at most for me with the frameworks i'm fluent with. And i can tweak anything and everything exactly to the product needs. I don't get why would anybody want to be dependent with such elementary thing on some external provider AND pay for it.

But i know people trying to outsource everything whats possible, i see this trend getting stronger and stronger, so perhaps it can get a lot of clients. Good luck anyways.

4 comments

I get your point and yes, a basic sign-up or login flow can take a few hours to code using a framework. But when you start adding features like OTPs, social login with account linking, conditional logic, data validation, 3rd party widgets to verify identity or link bank accounts, automations to send a welcome email, store the data in your CRM, etc. And as you grow, more things come up and that's when this starts to get messy and most of the time you regret reinventing the wheel.
I think only the welcome email is really valuable to have from all the things you listed. And if you can't handle few ifs within your sign in logic... good luck with your business logic.
I can attest to the pains of working with a complex onboarding flow... At my job, we have about 30 different paths the user could take depending on their usecase. And it's not modeled as 1 30-prong fork that everyone routes through, it's forks that lead back to other steps, skip steps, get data from elsewhere, etc. The difficulty is that it's typically the product and marketing teams who need to understand the flows the most, in order to understand the conversion metrics and how to optimize, yet they have almost no visibility into the actual state logic that dictates the flow in code. Giving them more control over control flow is a huge win
Just curious, What was the company about (eg. fintech)? I totally agree with this, thanks for sharing your experience!
This is a very traditional development view. "Build it and be done with it".

Signups are the gateway to your product. Often times, you need non-technical team members to be able to experiment and iterate with them. This type of work is often boring work for the engineering team.

Thanks for the feedback, I totally agree with this. We often see this mindset but its a matter of education or push the product from non-technical teams.
I wish my site was simple enough to have one of the most complex and important pieces only take two hours of work. That would be the dream.

I think that "And i can tweak anything and everything exactly to the product needs" part is the difficult part. Not so much implementing the "Getting Started" tutorial from Firebase or Auth0.

Nice job on taking on this problem guys

Because of the opportunity cost associated with building a sign-up flow. That means I can't spend my time working on a feature that's core to my service / application.
Agree with this statement. Thanks for the feedback!