This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Dave Berner
When I started building products, Auth-as-a-Service felt like a gift.
Plug in a few lines of JavaScript, and boom! Sign-up, login, and password reset all taken care of. No more rolling your own sessions or wrestling with bcrypt. It felt like cheating (in the best way).
But over time, something changed.
Authentication stopped being the problem. It was connecting it to everything else around it.
You still had to:
- Decide how users would pay
- Gate access to features after login
- Assign roles and permissions
- Customize onboarding flows
- Sync data to your CRM, analytics, and internal tools
- Handle cancellations, trials, and feature upgrades
None of that lived inside your auth provider. So you ended up bolting on half a dozen tools, wiring them together with glue code, and praying it held up.
Auth got abstracted. But the rest of the user journey? Still chaos.
So what was the choice? Bolt on more yet more tools and then figure out how to get them to talk to each other and keep all the data in sync.
That’s why I believe standalone Auth-as-a-Service is dead.
The future isn’t just about logging people in. It’s about managing the full customer journey:
That’s why we built Kinde as a platform, not just an auth provider.
We started with authentication but always knew it was just the first piece. Today Kinde gives you:
- Authentication
- Roles and permissions
- Feature flags
- Billing (Stripe-powered)
- Workflows
- User management
- Custom data
- B2B management
All working seamlessly together. All designed for SaaS builders. A fully integrated developer platform.
If you’re building a product where users sign up, pay, and expect gated access you don’t need another 6 services – you need a platform.
Auth-as-a-Service was great for 2015 but it’s 2025 now and it’s time to raise the bar.
This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Dave Berner