Hi HN! I’m Andrew Israel, an engineer and the founder of PropelAuth (https://www.propelauth.com). PropelAuth provides end-to-end managed user authentication and lets your users manage their own accounts and teams.

We have a special focus on B2B features that make it easy for an end user to sign up, create and manage their own organization in your product, invite their co-workers, and so on. This includes roles within the organization (RBAC). We provide frontend and backend libraries where organizations are a first class concept, and we host UIs on your domain to manage the rest.

We didn't start out with this focus. PropelAuth actually started out of a chess side project I was working on. As side projects go, I started by focusing on the core product and fun aspects of it. Things like user authentication felt like a distraction from the things I wanted to work on.

I’ve set up auth at different jobs and for friends' companies in the past, and I never felt like any tool nailed it. The experience I wanted was “all aspects of auth are taken care of for me, UIs included” and then to have minimal libraries to check if users were logged in or not. The MVP of PropelAuth was a set of basic UIs that we hosted on our customers domain, some admin tools, and a few frontend/backend libraries.

We were also dogfooding ourselves—and because we sell to businesses, we built out some B2B specific features: creating organizations, inviting coworkers, roles/RBAC, and the UIs for all that. When talking with early customers, those turned out to be the features that got the strongest reactions. B2B founders were looking for that, and existing auth tools didn’t have these features or didn’t have them in an easy to implement way. So that’s been our focus ever since.

The product today acts similarly to a self-contained auth microservice that you can configure. It has simple UIs like signup and login and then more advanced ones like security pages (with 2fa enrollment) and organization management (with roles support).

The frontend libraries request short lived tokens for your users that your backends can verify. It also exposes APIs to fetch user and organization information.

We have a free plan, and charge $0.02 per monthly active user for the next plan up.

We’d love to hear any feedback you have! If you want to try out the product, you can sign up on our website at https://www.propelauth.com. You can check out our docs at https://docs.propelauth.com/ and there are guides at https://www.propelauth.com/blog-categories/guide. Thanks!

user:	veryvisa
created:	March 16, 2022
karma:	8