Cloud-based User Management for Web Apps

Why? Honestly, how can you &quot;outsource&quot; such a vital part of your web app to a third party? Not only is this a privacy disaster but also, if this user service goes down or has a temporary downtime, your own business is effectively unusable.<p>I understand that it makes sense to not write these types of user functions and management things over and over again. The solution however, is not a SaaS, but a library or a little framework. And from what I remember, major Web development frameworks offer exactly these types of functionality.<p>I don&#x27;t want to be a downer and you guys probably spend a lot of time on the product, but from my perspective, any business owner using a third party to handle user data acts irresponsibly. You OWE it to your users to keep their data as tight and as centralized in one spot as possible – a spot only you and employees have access to and servers only you rented and have access to and not a third party.<p>I&#x27;d even rather use Wordpress as a basic user management platform than use a third party service. This way, it is at least fully under my control and I&#x27;m the only one responsible if things get broken or data gets stolen.

I wish you the best of luck with this. It&#x27;s really well designed.<p>I launched a very similar service named Accthub about 18 months ago and unfortunately it didn&#x27;t fare well. Now, there&#x27;s Mozilla Persona, Stormpath, Userapp, and probably several other in the same space.<p>Hope you can turn it into a legit business, but the general issue developers had was:<p>1) This is not a legit issue I have, my framework can handle this in the matter of a few minutes, maybe an hour or two if I want something really complex. 2) Privacy concerns. 3) High availability issues.<p>Best of luck, I will be monitoring your service closely because I want it to do well.

Looks intriguing and I can tell you guys have spent a lot of time on the feature-set. But the biggest thing that will hold me back(and may be others) is a lack of clarity about security and my data(what happens in the event that you are down? in the event that you close shop?)

Would be interesting to see the comparison of this against <a href="https://www.dailycred.com/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dailycred.com&#x2F;</a>

This looks great! For me as a developer, who considers using it for a side project, I would even bother to spend the 9$ for the development version. Would be great to have a (user limited?) forever free account.

Good luck. I have been using <a href="http://dailycred.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;dailycred.com&#x2F;</a> for an year now and very happy with it. They have free account available too which is definitely needed to try a product such as yours.

You could consider &quot;Bring Your Own Database.&quot;<p>Meaning give developers the nice UI and added features but connect to the database of the developer&#x27;s choice to actually store User data. That might address security and what if you close shop issues.<p>A SaaS app that does something similar conceptually is CushyCMS -- you give them your FTP information and they provide an interface without storing or hosting your content.<p><a href="https://www.cushycms.com/en/static/faq#tech_host" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cushycms.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;static&#x2F;faq#tech_host</a>

Looks great! Will surely use it for my next project.<p>Few suggestions:<p>1. Implement multiple ways to login (and charge accordingly) e.g Keyfile based, Color combination based, Biometric based, etc.<p>2. Do cross-platform API. I know you might think that BB is a sinking ship but to be ubiquitous you service needs to have an API on EVERY platform.<p>3. (This is more technical) Shard your db based on the location of your customers and accordingly replicate your data. e.g. If I launch a webapp hosted in India, I obviously don&#x27;t want my customers to hit sweden or US every time they login (with the undersea cable breaking every now and then). If the India mirror of your service goes down then there will be graceful degradation (users will login slowly by hitting the other replicas) but not a full downtime. Basically for a customer X running webapp W, the primary replica should reside in the vicinity of where W is hosted but backed up by replicas in other locations.<p>4. Introduce a free development tier for upto 4-10 users.

Hey, this looks like a nice time-saver for those of us starting up side projects. Not everybody wants to build out this stuff over and over, and working with OAuth is a pain. So, thanks!<p>Now, I know it&#x27;s on your roadmap, but I would really like to see sample code integrating with one or more payment providers or recurring billing management services. Stripe and Recurly would be top of my list. Would love it if you could get that up soon.<p>Would also like more docs about the differences between permissions and features. I mean, I think I get it, but more specific text would make me feel more sure.<p>Minor bug: in my own account information, when I went to go edit it, you have separate fields for given&#x2F;first name and surname, but you refer to both in the info&#x2F;help text as a surname or last name.<p>Anyway, nice job!

Looks good. I think the &#x27;hours saved&#x27; under &#x27;save time with userapp&#x27; is exaggerated a little :)<p>If i were to use it, I&#x27;d want some easy way to export the users though. I know i could iterate through them all and get the data (maybe not password hashes??), but at one point a web app would probably need something custom enough that i&#x27;d just want to have all the data myself.<p>I think things like stopping invalid signups, good spam protection etc could push people to use this. Also integrating login via facebook&#x2F;google&#x2F;twitter and making it work seamlessly out of the box would be a big plus. For those small website projects it would be much easier&#x2F;quicker to plug this in, and focus on the core of the app, rather than all the user backend crap.

Since I&#x27;ve built user&#x2F;admin systems for the majority of my career, this is really interesting to me. The site looks great and the Family Guy stuff is funny (&quot;No,n0_p4ssword!&quot;) Hah.<p>I agree with the lion share of what WA said.<p>The MVP&#x2F;prototype argument is a valid one, but remembering that nothing lasts forever, it&#x27;s probably wise to think of these services as temporary tools and not permanent solutions.<p>I believe that user management is such an important (and basic) thing, that you should own it. For the hackers out there, feel free to checkout my Drywall project, which is a website user system build for node. <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4951605" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=4951605</a>

My gut&#x27;s telling me this tool is going to be successful. But you&#x27;ll definitely need to grow some thicker skin. Disregard skeptics (unless it&#x27;s constructive criticism), keep building your product, and keep pushing.<p>Good luck.

This would be cool as an extension of the Mixpanel API. So instead of just tracking users you’d have all these features as well. I’ll agree with the criticism of this being a point of failure too big for mission critical systems, but if it gets proof of concepts off the ground sooner, who knows? Could be a great way to save time. I would suggest thinking carefully how you would eventually grow out of each component. That’d be my main concern. I want to be able to switch out components one at a time.

Nice work guys. I especially like the integrated pricing system. Adding a means of payment is a tricky aspect of a product. If that is taken care of well it saves a lot of time.

Would not use this. If I want saas I&#x27;ll use open id (facebook&#x2F;google login), its free and people are already using it.<p>If I want ownership of code, I&#x27;ll use existing frameworks.

I would honestly just use this to start off and save time, but once things start picking up, data export and in house user mgmt would be the move.

Really neat idea, and seems well built this far.<p>However, I feel like it needs a bit more until I try it out. Right now it would be a compromise between saving some hours in a few areas, and use those hours to learn Userapp and integrate it.<p>Anyhow, hope it moves along well – will check back on the progress in a few months and see if it have improved with more features, demos and examples.

This is a great idea. I&#x27;ve been thinking of developing something similar. But you cannot sell it as SaaS. It needs to be a one-time self hosted project so that startups and download, install and be ready in minutes. At the same time there are no security&#x2F;privacy issues that most users here are worried about.

Can anyone recommend a service similar to this (a backend framework) but which allows you to keep your own data?

We just launched UserApp after 9 months of hard work. Please try it out and let us know what you think :)

I&#x27;m working on something like this, but installable on your own server. Subscribe here if you want to know when I release it: <a href="https://lists.codingrobots.net/?p=subscribe&amp;id=3" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lists.codingrobots.net&#x2F;?p=subscribe&amp;id=3</a>

This is actually a pretty good idea, solves a legitimate annoyance. Obviously there is privacy concerns.

You claim it&#x27;s a low-latency, HA platform. What does that mean? Details are the only way to make your users feel secure that you won&#x27;t be going down when they need you the most.

good idea, but coming from a privacy startup this is obviously a no-go..<p>and distributing a web-app would equal to just open source it.. I know, it&#x27;s a dilemna

It does feel like they are running their user credentials and other &quot;critical&quot; stuff in MongoDB. I wouldn&#x27;t advice that.<p>Am I wrong? Curious.

This looks interesting, maybe a video of how it works? It&#x27;s clear that a lot of work has been put into this so kudos for that.

$89 is not &quot;about 18 bottles of beer.&quot;

Way too expensive for just a small piece of your business. Keep in mind a decent server at Digital Ocean is just $5&#x2F;month.

Are you going to add other currencies? What are the limitations of doing it?

This seems best suited for building a prototype quickly (i.e. Hackathons).

This site looks beautiful and very well thought out at first glance.<p>I think there might be a use case for this for simple projects, but the privacy implications of this in light of NSA and other government spying makes this unusable for most potential applications.