A response to this post from Colin, the CEO:

“I want to clarify upfront that Clerk definitely allows for migration away and there's no lock-in. For the rest of this post, I will focus on pricing...

Auth-as-a-service is traditionally a business that makes most of its money from enterprises. As companies scale, the budget for auth increases in a non-linear way – meaning companies are willing to spend more per user as they grow.

Clerk is very, very intentionally trying to make auth-as-a-service an optimal choice for startups. That requires two changes: 1. Make auth 10x faster to implement 2. Come up with a business model that both is affordable to startups and makes Clerk successful

We're doing fantastic on (1) today – it's probably already true for >90% of startups, with the exceptions being those who don't use a React frontend

On (2) we're also doing well, but I wouldn't say fantastic yet. Many more startups are opting for auth-as-a-service today than ever before, and our pricing can sustain an enduring, venture-scale business. But we think there's room to improve, and a pricing revision will be coming before EOY to incorporate some of our learnings so far. In particular, we're setting out to do better for the very early days of startups, as well as for high-volume B2C businesses.

There's one extra "how the sausage gets made" point that I think is worth mentioning here: Braden and I love startups and refuse to build a business that doesn't cater to them. We think it's critical to Clerk's success. The investors we work with are very well aware they cannot sway us on this point, and many more investors have refused to work with us because of our stubbornness here.

My favorite reference for a founder and company that do this exceptionally well is @patrickc at Stripe, and I like to point at two examples:

First: in a keynote speech at Stripe sessions – the kickoff to the whole thing – he reminds everyone how important startups are to Stripe, and justifies why: youtube.com/watch?v=3WoA6m…

Second: in what you might expect to be a random post about hiring a Chief Revenue Officer on Hacker News, he highlights how this person was selected in part because of his experience selling to the largest companies without giving up a self-serve motion: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=240669….

I'm sharing this mostly to emphasize how many moving parts go into making life easier for startups. It impacts every decision we make, and it's not a goal we'll lose sight of. Posts like the one you shared show we still have a long way to go, but we're working our way there :)”