Why I replaced Stripe with Polar, Prisma with Drizzle, and Clerk with BetterAuth and never looked back

I want to be upfront about something before you read this. I'm not a tech influencer. I'm not being paid by any of these companies. I'm just a developer who spent the last two years building SaaS products and hitting the same walls over and over until I finally stopped and asked myself why am I still using these tools? This is that story. The moment I knew something had to change I was three days into setting up payments for my latest project. Not building the product. Not writing features. Just