Database & auth

Databases and authentication used under AI-built frontends. The usual failure is a client that can read every row because a rule was never written.

7 tools

Better Auth
Database & auth
Open-source TypeScript authentication library that lives in your app, with plugins for sessions, social login, and organizations.
Pricing as seen: The framework is open source. Hosted dashboard and enterprise plans: See site.
Clerk
Database & auth
Hosted authentication and user management with prebuilt sign-in UI, billed on monthly retained users rather than raw signups.
Pricing as seen: Hobby is free. Pro is $25/month, or $20/month billed annually. Business is $300/month, or $250/month annually. Enterprise is custom. Billing is on monthly retained users.
Convex
Database & auth
Backend building blocks in TypeScript — queries, mutations, and a reactive database — aimed at apps and agents that should stay in sync.
Pricing as seen: See site.
Firebase
Database & auth
Google's app platform for auth, databases, storage, hosting, and related services used to build and run web and mobile apps.
Pricing as seen: See site. Usage-based Google Cloud billing, with credits sometimes offered for new billing accounts.
Neon
Database & auth
Serverless Postgres with branching, plus auth, object storage, and functions. Neon is part of Databricks.
Pricing as seen: See site.
Supabase
Database & auth
Postgres database with authentication, file storage, realtime, and edge functions, often the default backend under an AI-built app.
Pricing as seen: Free, then Pro from $25/month and Team from $599/month. Compute is billed per project. Pro includes $10/month in compute credits that cover one Micro instance. Enterprise is custom.
Xano
Database & auth
Backend platform for building and running APIs, data, and business logic, including with coding agents, on a stack you can govern.
Pricing as seen: See site.