crisopolis

Hi! I have a side project (that I haven't infiltrated with Claude Code yet, lol) that I need to dust off and get back to work on. It's essentially a B2B SaaS product where I needed to solve the usual suspects: multi-tenancy, SSO, RBAC, passkeys, sessions, and letting customers self-configure their IAM. Since it's a side project and I'm not paying for anything yet, I went ahead and integrated with WorkOS.

My project is built in Elixir, so I implemented the flows where my application has no login screen UI. I just push all unauthenticated users straight to WorkOS. WorkOS and their AuthKit (hosted login page) handles the heavy lifting (User/Pass, Passkey, MFA, SSO, etc) and sends them back to my application with a JWT. I check if the user exists, and if not, just-in-time provisioning kicks in on my side and we're done. Tenant identified, and tenant user authenticated all wrapped up in a single JWT.

Why WorkOS?

Simple... I don't want to be responsible for any authentication headaches. I don't want to self-host or duct tape a bunch of different components together. I'd rather put as much of that control in the client's hands (or WorkOS's if they don't have their own IAM). Plus, I like what WorkOS offers. Documentation is solid, though I still need to figure out their Fine Grained Authorization (FGA) product, formerly known as Warrant. In the end, nothing lives on my side except workos_tenant_id, workos_user_id, and my application data. The tenant has full control over their IAM, all the features of WorkOS via their own admin panel and ultimately who can access my SaaS application.

How's it going so far?

I have exactly zero customers except my development tenant. Everything works as expected so far. Maybe I'll have a different story when I get a customer willing to foot the bill for all the WorkOS bells and whistles in production. But implementation has been smooth, and AuthKit works great for dev/testing as a hosted login page, one-click testing SSO flows, etc.

If I had to re-implement, would I still choose WorkOS?

I probably would've done the same deep research you're doing, hoping to find that needle in a haystack. As a bootstrap developer, I'd try to avoid the paid options and figure out the open source/roll-your-own route. But if I had a plan to afford the paid ones, I'd probably evaluate WorkOS against other paid options properly.

Epic is a electronic health record (EHR) software used by many hospitals and clinics. It's not the only EHR there are many but it's probably the most known. Doctors usually type patient notes, diagnoses, prescriptions... everything goes in Epic and your team of providers can gain access to see that info.

I'm also in the process of building a product mostly in Elixir with minimal JavaScript. I just completed the WorkOS integration, now putting more effort into the actual product itself which is a extended workforce management SaaS.

What is your tech stack?

Backend: Phoenix

Frontend: Phoenix LiveView (with Preline UI)

Database: PostgreSQL (I want to use neon.tech soon for tenant db isolation)

Auth: WorkOS (for B2B SSO)

Cloud Provider: Fly.io (tbd)

Why did I choose this tech stack?

I've loved elixir for a few years but I've yet to build a functional SaaS with it yet. I've built one-off apps, and even stock algo bots. This time I'm going to try for something bigger which means I get to use Phoenix and LiveView to make a fast web app.

As for PostgreSQL we'll it's PostgreSQL and WorkOS seemed to be my biggest risk since I had no experience with it's platform or SSO OAuth2. However, WorkOS has tons of features that makes B2B SSO painless for me and potential customers. No real reason for fly.io yet.

Do you think your choices had any impact on your success or failure?

No success or failures yet.

Interesting, if they were going to provision a disposable vpn, couldn't they have done the same with the DNS.

Curious, your users like this design? Or is it a bit better once signed up?

Somethings do not work on mobile and while on desktop I was getting error pages clicking around. :-/

It still exists ello.co and I remember the same another FB/MySpace killer that didn't kill anything lol.

That site loads instantly on my mobile device over wifi. Is that fly.io only or do you use other caching services?

No, RadioShack brand is just being used for a trend. Not even related to keeping their technology or stores open/alive in 2022.

RIP RadioShack

Most likely Sonarr, Radarr they are library management and fetch apps.

Looks really close in design to Gleam.io's competition widgets they use.

Same with any other loan product the bank doesn't care if it's a scam, only cares about collecting that glorious interest payment or fees associated. Plenty of people buy bad used cars with loans that span over years and that used car may fail months after purchase. Guess who doesn't care... the loan provider/bank.

Still the point is Affirm was the wrong target for their chargeback and the OP should have contacted Affirm to potentially resolve the merchant not delivering the goods or a refund of the loan.

Merchant > Affirm > OP Bank

I agree it does read like the OP triggered the entire issue with payments using a chargeback originating from Chase, regardless of the support/platform issues with Affirm.

I don't believe charging back the loan provider had any outcome to getting their product/service.

Affirm was the wrong target.

This actually gave me an itch to make a web-based version... still pondering it.

This website is frustrating to use.

Wow, I use this same USB switch and also use two monitors for everything. Right now I manually switch my main monitor and just gave up on switching the monitor above it.

But this is friggin awesome.