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by masto 619 days ago
I've been in big tech and out of touch with the real world for a while, and I started a project only a couple of weeks ago to get a feel for what the cool kids are doing in web dev in 2024. So I can't claim any deep authority or experience with a lot of different approaches. But I picked Clerk because it was in a tutorial, and so far so good. It couldn't have been much easier, and the free tier seems more than generous enough to get through the prototype stage.

My main concern is that I don't want to weld too much of my design to any one service provider, so I've got to be careful about taking too much advantage of their feature set and API so that it won't be a pain if they go away or it becomes necessary to migrate to something else.
1 comments
simonhfrost 619 days ago
Lock in is definitely a valid concern, I emailed customer support and they replied with this:

Certainly understandable to worry about lock-in! We do try and make data exports as easy as possible. You can use our Backend API directly to retrieve all data for your users except for passwords: https://clerk.com/docs/reference/backend-api/tag/Users#opera...

If you need encrypted passwords in the export, you can contact our support team who will verify your account and provide a link from within your Clerk Dashboard to download the complete export directly.

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jenius 617 days ago
Head of support at Clerk here, can confirm this is accurate. We're right at the finish line with a project that will give you a secure export of your full user data through the dashboard without needing to email support as well.

We are very committed internally to making sure that folks using Clerk are doing so because they want to be, not because we have made it difficult to leave.

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simonhfrost 616 days ago
Amazing initiative! After hearing this I'm definitely keen to try out Clerk for my next project
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mooreds 618 days ago
This is great! I have looked at a lot of the vendors for my day job and it seems most everyone gives out password hashes.

The two most popular ones that don't (just to name and shame):

Amazon Cognito

Microsoft Entra ID (used to be Azure AD)

They really should (though gating behind support makes sense--hashes are sensitive).

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aprdm 617 days ago
What's the use case for the encrypted passwords out of curiosity ?
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