Your auth server shouldn't cost more RAM than your entire app. So I wrote my own in Rust.

I've been using Keycloak for almost 1 year across freelance projects — large-scale enterprise apps and small side projects alike. The appeal was always the same: it's free, battle-tested, and it works. Until it doesn't. The documentation is a labyrinth. Pages and pages of concepts and configurations that make sense if you already know Keycloak, but are genuinely hostile if you're just trying to get started. But the real breaking point was the math. A DigitalOcean droplet with enough RAM to run K