May 6, 2026
Auth Wars: The Breakup Saga
From Supabase to Clerk to Better Auth
Val Town dumped another big-name login tool, and the comments are absolutely roasting Clerk
TLDR: Val Town says it switched from Clerk to Better Auth after too many bugs, outages, and awkward account problems. In the comments, readers split between roasting Clerk as bloated and unreliable and asking whether Better Auth is really better—or just the next headache waiting to happen.
Val Town has officially completed its latest breakup: after already leaving Supabase, it moved from Clerk to Better Auth—and the crowd is treating it like a reality-show reunion episode. The company’s complaint was simple in plain English: its old login provider wasn’t just handling sign-ins, it also wanted to act like the master list of users, and that turned into a headache. Val Town says the setup led to bugs, outages, awkward workarounds, and even moments where people could sign up but still end up in weird half-finished account limbo.
But the real fireworks were in the comments. One camp was basically yelling, “Clerk is a mess”, with one user claiming people are lining up to escape and mocking the service for trying to do everything at once—payments, crypto, extra features, the lot. Another jabbed at the growing software bloat, saying Clerk’s giant JavaScript file is now slow enough to trigger browser warnings, which is the nerd equivalent of getting publicly booed.
Still, this wasn’t a total landslide. Better Auth got some love for being more flexible and easier to tinker with, including one oddly delightful example involving a custom sign-in plugin for a customer-management tool. But skeptics were quick to ask whether Better Auth still has its own annoying quirks. And amid the snark, one wholesome subplot emerged: readers loved Val Town’s unusually candid writing, praising it as rare, honest behind-the-scenes storytelling in a world where most companies only post victory laps.
Key Points
- •Val Town says it moved from Supabase to a conventional database setup in 2023, using Render for the database and Clerk for authentication.
- •The company filed an issue by late 2023 to leave Clerk and says it completed a switch to Better Auth a month before the article was published.
- •The article says Clerk’s model of acting as both a users table and a sessions table conflicted with Val Town’s architecture.
- •Val Town reports that a Clerk endpoint used to load user data had a production rate limit of five requests per second across the whole account.
- •To handle social features and broader user-profile access, Val Town says it synced Clerk data into its own database via webhooks, which added signup and account-state complexity.