Struggling With Whether to Build Your Own Auth?

Look, I get it. You're sitting there thinking "how hard can auth really be?" and honestly, for basic username/password stuff, you're not wrong. Building your own is totally doable. But here's the thing -- "simple auth" in 2025 isn't actually simple anymore. 

The Complexity Creep Nobody Talks About

Want passkeys? Welcome to WebAuthn hell -- device attestation, cross-platform compatibility nightmares, and browser quirks that'll make you question your life choices. Planning to add SSO for enterprise customers? Hope you enjoy debugging SAML and OIDC implementations across dozens of providers, each with their own special interpretation of the specs.

Then there's all the security stuff most devs forget about: rate limiting that actually works, breach monitoring, session management across web/mobile/API clients. It's like asking whether you'd forge your own door locks or just buy certified ones. Sure, you could make a lock, but do you really want to?

The Middle Ground Trap

NextAuth and similar frameworks seem like the perfect compromise -- you get control without reinventing OAuth from scratch. But here's what they don't tell you: you still own everything. 

Security patches when vulnerabilities drop? That's you, and this is what you’ll be dealing with.  Scaling when you hit growth? Also you. Compliance documentation for that enterprise deal? Yep, still you. Incident response at 2 AM when sessions are broken? Definitely you.

Where Should You Actually Spend Your Time?

The real question isn't whether you can build auth -- it's whether you should. For a side project or learning exercise? Absolutely build it yourself. You'll learn tons and it's genuinely fun once you get into it.

But for production apps serving real users? The auth rabbit hole goes way deeper than it looks from the surface. We've seen too many breaches from "simple" custom implementations -- timing attacks leaking user data, broken session invalidation, missing CSRF protection that seemed obvious in retrospect.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Not all complexity is unnecessary bloat. Sometimes it's just necessary complexity you don't want to maintain. Authentication sits in that awkward category where the basics are straightforward, but the production-ready version involves a thousand edge cases you haven't thought of yet. Choosing to DIY can be especially reckless if you’re vibe coding and new to the scene.

The best code is code you don't have to write -- especially for security-critical paths where one mistake can sink your entire company. Your users don't care if you built your auth from scratch. They care about your actual product working reliably.

The Real Decision

Yes, beware vendors selling overcomplicated solutions to genuinely simple problems. But authentication in 2025 rarely falls into the "simple" category anymore. The key is knowing which problems are actually simple -- and auth stopped being one of them somewhere around the time everyone started expecting SSO and passkeys.

Choose your battles. Build what makes your product unique. Let someone else handle the security-critical infrastructure that every app needs but nobody wants to maintain.