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A bit of a meta point, but Clerk must be doing really well if they're already positioned as the thing to make alternatives to.



Clerk has quite a few dark patterns in their free tier, eg: if your app is on Clerk free tier, all your users will be forced to log out and re-login every 7 days (and they try to obfuscate this fact until you're locked in). For this reason, I've recently had to migrate away from them - I'm really glad there are alternatives.


Cofounder of Clerk here - we definitely want free plan users to be aware of this limitation - any suggestions to improve visibility?

On https://clerk.com/pricing , “Customizable session duration” is listed as a primary benefit of the pro plan, and in the chart we show that the free plan is “Fixed to 7 days”

Apologies we failed to make it clear before you started, that’s definitely not intended. We thought this was a good limitation for the free plan because it doesn’t impact your ability to learn if your product is resonating. If it is, and our default doesn’t work for your app, then we hope you can upgrade now that your product is validated. (It’s maybe worth mentioning that the default of 7 days was selected by copying Google’s session lifetime, also not meant to be nefarious.)


What did you migrate to instead?


I went for NextAuth - the use case was relatively simple, and I wanted maximum control.


Ehh I actually don’t think that’s that bad — they do have to run a business! What limitation would work better on the free tier?

This came up on Reddit and the founder responded directly there, seemed like they were going to add a tool tip or something to make it clearer.




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