I Built a Self-Hosted Auth System Like Clerk — Here's What I Learned

Every serious project needs authentication. As someone early in my career, I kept running into the same problem: register, login, email verification, password reset, and OAuth. Every. Single. Project. I’d used Clerk before, and it’s excellent, but I started wondering: how does it actually work under the hood? That question turned into AuthKit — a self-hosted, multi-tenant identity API I now use across all my projects. The Problem I’d used Clerk on a previous project, and it felt like magic — you