We thought authentication-as-a-service vendors might ease our pain, but over and over again, we were disappointed by how much extra work was necessary. We never understood why until one friend quipped, "auth-as-a-service really just solves half of 2-factor auth."

Then it clicked. We needed all of user management, not just authentication. And we realized if we could solve this problem, countless others could benefit, too.

Today, we're absolutely thrilled to launch Clerk: user management as-a-service. We're solving the whole problem, from frontend to backend, with beautiful UIs and elegant APIs. Our architecture pulls user management out of the way, so developers can focus on what makes their software truly special.

Our launch today includes UI components for Sign Up, Sign In, User Profile, and what we're calling the "User Button." They can be mounted directly in your application, or you can redirect users to a Clerk-hosted page on accounts.yourdomain.com.

Best of all, the components will automatically update as our team optimizes their design, develops new features, and adds support for the latest in account security.

While today marks an exciting milestone for Clerk, this is truly just a "minimum viable product." The roadmap ahead will bring many features to better support developers and their end users:

• SDKs for additional languages and frameworks
• Additional OpenID Connect and OAuth providers
• Additional 2-step verification factors like TOTP and WebAuthN
• Session management and revocation in the User Profile
• Team management and enterprise authentication like SAML

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