Customer story · Auth0
Seven years inside Auth0
From 2012 to 2019, we built core product alongside Auth0 as they grew from startup to unicorn.
About Auth0
A global leader in authentication services, Auth0 was founded to provide secure access to any application in one click or less. Their platform gives developers simple, scalable building blocks to address identity requirements across any language or tech stack.
The problem
Auth0 holds itself to three principles: the platform must be extensible, it must put developers first, and it must stay simple — both to use and to tailor. Every piece of it has to satisfy all three at once, which is a hard brief for anyone building a part of it.
We started working with them in 2012, and spent the next seven years solving key challenges alongside their team.
What we built
The sign-in widget came first, and it is a pivotal component of the platform: it is what a client customises when they want their users to meet their own product rather than ours. Then the User Admin Panel, which is where clients manage authentication settings, and where "simple to tailor" either holds up or does not.
When Auth0 needed a redesigned Support Center implemented, we coded it in React — linking to their documentation and code samples, and showing the live status of every Auth0 service. We also developed seven different extensions, the optional pieces a client downloads to shape their version of the product.
Their system needed a boost in integrity, so we added intensive automated unit and integration tests covering a variety of scenarios. And when they wanted their Python and Node.js libraries written from scratch, they asked us — those libraries are open source, which means the code went out under their name to the developer community the platform is built for.
How it ran
Seven years, starting in 2012, across six distinct pieces of the platform. Not one engagement but a standing collaboration: each piece began when Auth0 needed that part built, and the team that had built the last one already knew the system.
The outcome
By 2019, Auth0 was handling 3,000 secure logins per second — 2.5 billion every month — for tens of millions of registered users. In 2021, Okta acquired Auth0 for $6.5 billion.
The parts we built are the parts a developer touches first: the widget they configure, the panel they administer from, the libraries they import. Over seven years the measure of the work was whether it disappeared into the platform — and it did.
What this draws on
Related services
- Product Development
Six pieces of one platform, each shipped by people who already knew the last five.
- Platform Engineering
Extensions, libraries and an admin panel are what a platform gives its developers to build with.
- QA Automation
Unit and integration tests across a variety of scenarios, because authentication has no acceptable failure rate.
Something like this in your software?
The first conversation is with the engineers who would build it — not a sales script.