One architecture decision
that removes five vendor risks.
Auth0, Clerk, Stripe, Keygen, LaunchDarkly. Each is a dependency you don't own, can't audit, and pays a price increase whenever they want. Bastionary collapses all five into infrastructure you control.
The five-vendor stack has compounding risk.
Each vendor adds an integration to maintain, a security bulletin to watch, a contract to renew, and a team to depend on. Five separate attack surfaces. Five separate pricing levers they control.
| Vendor | What it does | Risk to you | Bastionary equivalent |
|---|---|---|---|
| Auth0 / Clerk | Identity, login, MFA | High User data leaves your infrastructure | Full OIDC IdP + MFA engine, self-hosted |
| Stripe | Payments, subscriptions | Medium Subscription logic not portable | Stripe + Paddle + PayPal + Mollie in one API |
| Keygen | Software licensing | Medium License server availability dependency | Offline RSA-signed license keys + seat management |
| LaunchDarkly | Feature flags | Low $300+/mo for a KV store with logic | Feature flags with user/org/plan targeting |
| Custom audit logging | Compliance, SIEM | High Logs scattered, no chain integrity | SHA-256 chained audit log, SIEM JSON export |
What you're actually deciding.
Data residency
User PII, session tokens, and auth events never leave your infrastructure. Deploy in your AWS/GCP/Azure VPC, your Hetzner server, or on-prem. No data sharing agreement to negotiate.
Audit trail integrity
Every auth event is SHA-256 chained — each log entry includes the hash of the previous. Any tampering is detectable. Export to your SIEM in structured JSON. SOC 2 evidence generation (Q2 2026).
No per-MAU pricing
Auth0's pricing scales with MAU count, enterprise feature tiers, and SSO connections. At meaningful scale, costs can be substantial — check current public pricing at auth0.com. Bastionary is a flat server cost. Scale to 10M users without a billing alert.
Single operational surface
One Docker image. One database. One log stream. One place to patch when a CVE drops. Your ops team doesn't need five runbooks and five vendor dashboards.
No lock-in by construction
Standard OIDC/SAML means every identity integration works. Your users can be exported. Your OIDC clients point to your URL, not ours. Moving away from Bastionary requires only updating your OIDC issuer URL.
Upgrade on your schedule
We ship a binary. You deploy when you're ready. No surprise breaking changes pushed to production on a vendor's timeline. Pin a version, test it, deploy it. You own the upgrade decision.
What CTOs ask us.
"Auth is not our core competency. Why would we run it ourselves?"
You're not building auth from scratch. Bastionary is the infrastructure — the same way you run a database without writing a database engine. You operate it; we've built it. The alternative isn't "outsource auth" — it's "outsource auth to a company that may get acquired, change pricing, or have a breach that you can't audit."
"What's the operational burden?"
One process, one database, one binary. The same ops burden as running Postgres. It has a health endpoint, structured logs, and Prometheus metrics. If your team can operate a web application, they can operate Bastionary. The backup strategy is "back up your database," same as everything else.
"What if Bastionary shuts down?"
Your deployed instance keeps running. Forever. It doesn't phone home. The binary you deployed continues to function regardless of what happens to us. This is the fundamental difference from SaaS auth: you own the running process, not a subscription to ours.
"We're already deep in Auth0. Migration cost?"
Auth0 can export user records including password hashes (hash export requires a support-assisted process; availability depends on your plan tier). Bastionary imports them directly — no password resets required for users whose hashes are exportable. OIDC client redirect URIs change to your Bastionary endpoint. We have a migration playbook. The typical migration for a 50K user app takes one engineer one week. Read the full guide.
Let's walk through your stack.
30-minute call. We'll look at what you're running, what it costs, and what a migration to Bastionary would actually involve. No sales deck.