Better Auth is the go-to solution for many people using Nextjs, so it makes sense that Vercel puts some effort in maintaining it.

I have never had issues running Nextjs in regular containers, it is just a good open source solution, I don't see why it would be any different with Better Auth.

I work in the auth space (for FusionAuth) and we run into plenty of folks that started out rolling auth themselves. Just username and password right? A bit of hashing, salting and leveraging a built-in crypto library.

But then you need to add account recovery. And then MFA. And then registration. And then progressive registration. And then webhook integration. And then passkeys. And then SAML integration. And the delegated SAML setup. And then and then and then.

You're distracted from your core application by feature requests for your login system.

You have lots of options nowadays. Use a library provided by your framework (Rails, Spring, and Django have them), use a tool like Better Auth, use a third party system like FusionAuth or Auth0. But don't build undifferentiated functionality that impacts your user experience.

PS Of course, where I stand depends on where I sit, but I firmly believe that you should not build an auth system the same way you should not build a database.

but to me that’s less risk than our auth getting bought by somebody whose business goals don’t necessarily align with mine.