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The hidden trap of building your own auth

Ever tried building your own login system because you thought, "it's just a database table and some bcrypt"? I've been there, and honestly, it usually starts as a weekend project that turns into a multi-year maintenance nightmare that eats your engineering budget alive.

When you're starting a new project, the "Buy" option looks expensive and restrictive. You want total control over the CSS of your login page, and you don't want to pay a per-user fee to some vendor.

• The Password Illusion: Most devs think they can just hash a password and call it done, but they forget about salt, pepper (an extra secret key stored separately from the database), and the ever-changing recommendations for work factors (this is basically how hard the computer has to work to check a password, which needs to increase as hackers get faster computers).
• Budget Wins: Skipping an okta or Auth0 license feels like a win for the ceo today, but you aren't accounting for the developer hours spent on "forgot password" flows.
• UI Control: You want that pixel-perfect experience in your retail app or healthcare portal without dealing with weird redirects or iframes.

The moment you land your first big B2B customer, the "simple" auth system falls apart. They don't want to use your signup form; they want to connect their own identity provider.

• The protocol soup: Suddenly you're reading 100-page specs for saml 2.0 and oidc because a bank won't sign the contract without it. (How to fix the SAML Error Request not signed. Policy requires ...)
• Security debt: You aren't just writing code; you're signing up for a lifetime of patching vulnerabilities like session fixation or open redirects.
• Compliance headaches: Getting your SOC2 is a mountain of work, and proving your home-grown auth is secure to an auditor is much harder than showing them a vendor's report. (7 Myths About SOC 2 Compliance | Blog - OneTrust)

According to The 2024 State of Identity Report, 65% of organizations say managing identity is getting more complex due to hybrid work and new api threats. This isn't just a "set it and forget it" thing anymore.

In practice, a healthcare company might start with a simple db login, but then they realize they need HIPAA-compliant mfa and session timeouts that trigger across multiple subdomains. It gets messy fast.

So, once you realize your "simple" login is actually a full-time job, you have to look at the real cost of ownership. Next, we'll dive into the actual dollars and cents of maintaining this beast.

Evaluating the Total Cost of Ownership

Ever wonder why your "simple" auth service is suddenly costing as much as a small dev team? It's because the sticker price of a vendor is visible, but the cost of building it yourself is buried in Jira tickets and 3am PagerDuty alerts.

When you build, you aren't just paying for the initial sprint. You’re paying for the opportunity cost of your senior engineers who should be building your actual product features. If your lead dev spends three weeks debugging a race condition in your session management, that is thousands of dollars down the drain.

• The Maintenance Tax: You have to update libraries, patch cve vulnerabilities, and rotate certificates. It’s a treadmill that never stops.
• Scaling Pains: Handling 1,000 users is easy. Handling a million during a retail Black Friday surge without your database locking up? That requires expensive infra tuning.
• The "Bus Factor": This is a big one for managers to understand—it's the risk that your project stalls or dies if a key person gets hit by a bus (or just quits). If only one guy knows how the custom login works, you're in trouble.

According to The 2023 Ponemon Institute Cost of Data Breach Report, the average cost of a data breach reached $4.45 million. A huge chunk of that comes from compromised credentials and poor identity security. This is exactly why "weekend project" code is so dangerous; if your home-grown system has one tiny hole, you're looking at a multi-million dollar disaster.

In a finance app, you might think building mfa is cheaper. But then you realize you need to integrate with SMS gateways, handle delivery failures in different countries, and manage recovery codes.

A retail company I worked with tried to roll their own social login. They saved on api fees but spent months fixing issues where users ended up with duplicate accounts because the email mapping was slightly off between Google and Apple.

Bugs in identity layers don't happen at 2pm on a Tuesday. They happen when a certificate expires on a Sunday night. If you own the stack, your team is on the hook to fix it. With a vendor, that's their problem to solve while you sleep.

It's also about the "long tail" of features. Your customers will eventually ask for things like SCIM provisioning or "Step-up" authentication for high-risk actions. Building those from scratch is a massive undertaking.

Anyway, once you've looked at the money, you gotta think about the actual security risks. Next, we're going to talk about why home-grown auth is a massive target for hackers.

Common Security Vulnerabilities in Custom Auth

If you decide to build, you're basically painting a target on your back. Hackers love home-grown systems because they usually miss the "boring" security stuff that specialized vendors spend all day perfecting.

• Session Fixation: This is where an attacker steals a user's session by giving them a valid session ID before they even log in. If your code doesn't rotate the ID after the user enters their password, the hacker just walks right in.
• Open Redirects: You've seen those URLs that say ?next=/dashboard. If you don't validate that "next" parameter, a hacker can send a user to a fake login page on a different site, and your app will happily help them do it.
• Credential Stuffing: This is the big one. Hackers take billions of leaked passwords from other sites and try them on yours. Unless you've built sophisticated rate limiting and bot detection—which is really hard—your database will get hammered until they find a match.

These aren't just theoretical problems; they're the bread and butter of how modern breaches happen. Next, we're going to look at the specific trade-offs for growth and when buying is the smarter move.

When buying is the smarter move for growth

So, you've realized that building your own auth is basically like trying to build your own car just to drive to the grocery store—it’s a lot of work for something that isn't your main goal. When you're trying to scale, especially in the B2B world, "buying" isn't just about saving time; it's about not letting your roadmap get hijacked by enterprise requirements.

If you use a tool like SSOJet, you can basically skip the three months of "learning how SAML works" and just ship the feature. It’s designed to handle those messy b2b workflows where every customer has a different idea of how their roles should map to your app.

• Multi-tenancy out of the box: You don't have to rewrite your entire database schema to support different "organizations" or "workspaces."
• Self-service onboarding: Instead of your support team manually exchanging metadata files with a customer’s IT dept, you give them a link where they do it themselves.
• Focus on the "Core": Your engineers can go back to building the stuff people actually pay for, like your ai engine or your dashboard, instead of fixing a login bug for the tenth time.

Honestly, I've seen teams spend an entire quarter just trying to get a single bank integrated because of weird xml formatting issues in their saml assertions. Using a specialized provider offloads that headache to people who actually enjoy reading those specs (weird, I know).

The tech world moves fast, and suddenly everyone wants Passkeys or FIDO2 because passwords are, frankly, a disaster. If you built your own system, adding webauthn support is a massive project that touches your frontend, backend, and database.

• Stay Current: When a new security standard drops, your vendor usually adds it before you even hear about it on Hacker News.
• Enterprise IDP Harmony: Whether your customer uses Okta, Ping Identity, or some ancient on-prem Active Directory, a good vendor acts as the "universal translator."
• Reduced Risk: You aren't the one responsible for keeping up with the latest oauth2 security best practices; they are.

A 2024 report by Verizon indicates that a massive percentage of breaches still involve the use of stolen credentials. By buying into a modern system, you get features like breached password detection and anomaly sensing that you’d never have time to build yourself.

I remember a retail startup that tried to build their own social auth. They were doing fine until Google changed an api version and suddenly half their users couldn't log in on a Friday night. If they'd bought a solution, that update would've happened behind the scenes without them lifting a finger.

Anyway, once you've decided to buy, you still gotta make sure the thing is actually secure. Next, we're going to look at those rare edge cases where you might actually have to build it yourself.

The niche cases where building makes sense

Look, I know I’ve spent the last ten minutes telling you that building your own auth is a recipe for disaster. But honestly—there are a few weird, high-stakes corners of the tech world where the "buy" button just doesn't work.

If you’re working in a basement for a defense contractor or building a system for a nuclear power plant, you probably aren't allowed to call an external api for anything. These air-gapped environments literally have no internet access, so a cloud-based identity provider is out of the question immediately.

Sometimes your hardware is just too weird for oidc. I once saw a team building a biometric door lock system for high-security labs where the auth happened at the firmware level using a proprietary handshake.

• Hardcore Compliance: In some jurisdictions, certain government or military data cannot leave a specific physical server, making even "private cloud" vendor offerings a tough sell for auditors.
• The "Product is Identity" Exception: If you are literally building the next Okta or a new decentralized identity protocol, then yeah, you have to build it. You can't outsource your own core value prop.
• Legacy Debt: If you’re integrating with 40-year-old mainframe systems that use non-standard headers or custom binary protocols, a modern vendor might actually get in the way.

According to a study by Cybersecurity Insiders, about 42% of organizations still struggle with integrating IAM with legacy systems. Sometimes, the "integration" is so painful that writing a custom shim is the only way forward.

Anyway, these cases are rare. Unless you're dealing with secret satellites or ancient cobol servers, you're usually better off buying. Now that we've covered the risks and the exceptions, let's wrap this up with a framework for your final decision.

Making the final decision

So, you're at the finish line. Deciding whether to keep managing your own auth or offload it to a vendor basically comes down to where you want your smartest engineers spending their Tuesdays.

Before you write another line of custom middleware, ask yourself these:

• Resource Drain: Do we actually have 3+ full time devs just to handle identity maintenance and patching?
• Core Value: Is auth a core differentiator for our customers, or are they just trying to get into the dashboard?
• Risk Appetite: Can we afford a security breach because of a custom bug in our session logic?

Honestly, unless you're building for a nuclear sub or you are an identity company, buying wins. As we looked at earlier, the Ponemon Institute data shows breaches cost over $4 million on average—that is just too expensive to risk on "weekend project" code that hasn't been battle-tested. In retail or finance, speed to market is everything—don't let a saml integration hold up your revenue.

Anyway, pick the path that lets you ship faster. Good luck.