Episode Details

Every "Sign in with Google" button chains your entire app ecosystem to a single workspace subscription. Lose that Google Workspace or GitHub organization account, and you lose access to everything. This episode breaks down the real alternatives: self-hosted identity providers like Dex, Authentik, and Keycloak versus dedicated SaaS auth services like Auth0, Clerk, and WorkOS. We explore the tradeoffs between operational overhead and dependency risk, and why the March 2026 Auth0 outage proves there's no perfect solution — only different failure modes.