Val Town ditches Clerk for Better Auth

This reads like a mature-app auth decision, not a feature bakeoff. Once auth is on the critical path, convenience matters less than owning the failure modes.

• –Clerk worked for simpler frontend apps, but Val Town needed a real users table and richer local account data
• –The biggest complaint is operational: API rate limits and upstream outages turned auth into a product-wide single point of failure
• –Better Auth wins here because it keeps auth in-app while still offering modern framework support and plugin-based extensions
• –The tradeoff does not disappear, it shifts from SaaS uptime risk to codebase ownership and self-hosted maintenance
• –For AI dev teams, the broader lesson is to be wary of making identity a black box when your app needs tight control over sessions, agents, and user state