Better Auth is joining Vercel

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All postsBetter Auth is joining Vercel<br>Better Auth is joining Vercel. We're joining to accelerate our work on open-source auth and securing agent workflows.

Bereket Engida·@bekacru·Jul 7, 2026

© 2026 Better Auth Inc.Toggle theme

Better Auth is joining Vercel

I’m excited to announce that Better Auth is joining Vercel.

From the very beginning, this team has been our biggest inspiration and has always reflected many of the reasons we started working on Better Auth.

Vercel shares our commitment to keeping auth open source, framework and platform agnostic. Joining forces gives us more resources and room to focus on building the framework that much of the community relies on.

Together, we’ll also be able to invest more deeply in where auth is heading: a future where agents act on users’ behalf and need secure, scoped, and revocable access, while bringing these primitives across Vercel’s products.

I’m incredibly grateful to our community, everyone who inspired us in different ways and helped us get here.

How Better Auth started

Three years ago, I was building an open-source web analytics platform and I needed to add auth. Back then, whenever I started a project with Next.js, I’d reach for NextAuth. Most of the time, all I needed was “sign in with Google” and a simple user object, so it worked great.

But for that project, I needed organizations (multi-tenant): inviting teammates, roles, permissions, proper access control. I looked for something I could pull in and use alongside NextAuth, but nothing really existed. The options were to build it myself or use a third-party auth service.

It took me a couple of weeks to build organizations into the project and refactor everything around it, and I still wasn’t satisfied with the result. Shortly after, I started experimenting with next-org, a wrapper on top of NextAuth that would add organization support and document best practices. I kept hitting walls, the APIs never felt ergonomic, and I eventually gave up midway.

Then I kept running into the same problem everywhere.

I was working on a small Expo app, and adding OAuth with NextAuth felt nearly impossible. And later, I wanted to see if I could move a Next.js project to Svelte, but there was no “NextAuth for Svelte,” so the migration was painful.

Around that time, before AI became a daily topic and when the React-vs-everything debates flared up every other week, there was a recurring argument on X about whether we should be rolling our own auth or just use a service.

Most people seemed to want to own their auth. Almost every reason not to boiled down to “I don’t want to spend time building feature X.” So I started thinking about building a framework-agnostic auth framework with a simple core for everyday apps, extensible with plugins for any auth feature you need.

I came up with the name better-auth and made a promise to myself: if the package name was available on npm, that was my sign to build it.

Luckily, it was.

So I started working on it, on and off, for about 7 months, while also building adjacent libraries like better-fetch (which I needed for the Better Auth client) and better-call (a simple web server framework for the Better Auth backend). After rewriting the whole framework about four times, sweating the docs and what not, I posted a screenshot on X with just: “September 28.”

I had almost no following then, but somehow that post got people’s attention. I spent the week finalizing the last pieces and published the first release on September 28.

From week one, people started joining the Discord, opening issues, giving feedback, and actually using it. Better Auth stayed in beta for the first three months, and every Friday through the end of November 2024 I shipped a new release packed with fixes, improvements, and new features, until we hit 1.0.

Around then, I got pretty intense about it all. I wanted to keep improving the framework, stay engaged with the community on Discord, keep GitHub tidy, and learn every new auth concept people surfaced through feature requests and bug reports.

I think that worked really well. People loved Better Auth in a way that still feels rare. I kept seeing tweets on X praising the DX, the API design, and the docs—and the developer community started creating YouTube tutorials, writing blog posts, and recommending the project to others.

Better Auth became a company

I used to watch Y Combinator videos religiously. I’d tried starting a local startup before, but I wanted to apply to YC only once I had something that was really working.

Better Auth felt like that thing.

It wasn’t completely clear how it would become a business, but I figured we’d work that out and if anyone was going to take a bet on me, it would be YC. I applied, interviewed with Pete, and he was gracious enough to take a chance on me. I got in.

Getting into YC was an extraordinary moment for...