For a long time this blog was me writing about auth while the product was still finding its legs. That chapter is over.
SpartanAuth is live. Not a slide deck. Not a private prototype I only demo on good days. It is running in real applications — including several of my own — and other people are shipping with it too.
When I started SpartanAuth, I had a simple obsession: authentication should be easy to do correctly. Complexity is where security bugs and abandoned sign-ins both hide. Today I want to talk about the login widget.
TLDR: usability, branding, and making the secure path the easy path.
Businesses lose real money when people cannot sign in. “About a third of online purchases are abandoned at checkout because consumers cannot remember their passwords,” from a study conducted jointly by MasterCard and the University of Oxford (source). That is a big reason I care about helping apps move away from relying on passwords.
I’m Mason Payne, and this is my blog about building SpartanAuth.
I started these posts while getting the product off the ground. The short version of where things stand now: SpartanAuth is a real auth service I use in several of my own applications. I’m still writing here when I learn something worth sharing — passwords, passkeys, login UX, and the tradeoffs you hit when auth has to work for real users.
