I've had several side-project ideas over the years but haven't launched one because I'm not very experienced with social login and account management, backend permissions, or secure payment handling. I'm willing to learn, but I'd prefer not to reinvent security-sensitive systems.
My projects would probably have simple subscription tiers such as free, hobbyist, and pro. Which social login providers are generally worth supporting, and what are you using for authentication and authorization? Since these would be low-traffic projects, I'd rather avoid a large monthly bill. Would you choose a managed service such as Auth0, Clerk, Supabase, or Keycloak, or build more of it yourself?
For payments, is Stripe Checkout with webhooks the usual approach? How do you track subscription status and entitlements, handle webhook retries, and monitor abuse or intrusion? I'm comfortable with AWS, Cloudflare, Go, JavaScript, and Linux, and I'd appreciate recommendations for useful open-source examples.
Finally, how capable are current frontier LLMs at producing clean, auditable authentication and payment code? Is anyone comfortable using AI-generated code in these areas, and what review process do you use before trusting it in production?
4 Answers
One useful authorization model is a small policy table containing the subject, resource, action, and any conditions. It avoids scattering hardcoded tier checks throughout the application, and adding another plan usually becomes a data change instead of a code migration. I’d still start with the simplest model that covers the current product rather than designing a full authorization framework on day one.
I wouldn’t blindly trust AI-generated code for authentication or payments. These are established problem areas, so AI can help explain APIs, generate tests, or provide scaffolding, but every security-sensitive path needs careful human review. Check the provider’s documentation, inspect token validation and authorization boundaries, test replayed and out-of-order webhooks, review dependency changes, and use static analysis plus integration tests. AI-written code can be acceptable, but only when it goes through the same review process as code from any other developer.
OAuth2 and JWTs can work well when you need flexibility, but a managed identity provider will save a lot of implementation and security work for a small project. For payments, Stripe’s APIs and hosted checkout are straightforward, although you should keep your own entitlement model deliberately small and reconcile it against Stripe instead of assuming every local update succeeds.
For authentication, I’d use a managed provider such as Auth0, Clerk, Supabase, or Keycloak rather than rolling your own. Authentication bugs are easy to introduce and hard to notice. For a simple free/hobbyist/pro setup, start with a role or plan value plus centralized authorization checks, then move to a policy table if the rules become more detailed. Stripe Checkout is a good fit for payments. Verify webhook signatures, make processing idempotent by storing event IDs, and treat subscription changes as asynchronous because webhooks can be delayed or retried.
That makes sense. I was thinking of using AI mostly for boilerplate and test cases, not treating its output as trusted just because the code looks polished.