Yea I went through this as well - when I tested it, they also required you be on a paid plan to even be able to get the export, which is kinda crazy. I work at an auth company now (Clerk) and this experience drove our current approach, which is that you can instantly export all your user data through a button in the dashboard. Maybe it's not as "sticky", but I think respecting your users when they want to get their data or migrate off is way more important.
I work at Clerk - same opinion here. Rolling your own auth is a trap. It's super easy when you are just getting started with your product and I cannot count how many times I have seen developers boast about how they rolled their own auth and now they aren't "locked in" to a vendor and are saving tons of money etc.
But the truth is, if you scale up as a company, it will end up costing you more in engineering salaries to re-create and maintain all the auth features you will need to support like @mooreds mentioned above than just using an auth library/vendor in the first place. And if you don't scale up, you are unlikely to push outside of the cheap or free tiers of any auth vendor you do go with, so it's a wash. Every reputable auth vendor has a pretty generous free tier.
It feels scary to go this direction because what happens if you blow up and then it becomes ultra expensive and now you're "locked in". All the time I see developers put hundreds of thousands, or millions of MAU into an auth vendor's pricing calc then gawk over the projected monthly bill and decide to roll their own. But the reality is that this doesn't happen. By the time you have that many MAU, you're typically paying out many multiples of that in engineer salaries alone, and paying an auth vendor a fraction of a single engineer's salary to handle your auth is substantially better value than hiring a team to build and maintain your own from scratch.
We have churned our fair share of large company customers over the years, as has every other auth vendor. They have all been because they needed feature we didn't have, not because the price was too high.
Clerk employee here - it's certainly the case that a lot of our users are JS ecosystem users, which is why those SDKs have received extra attention. That being said, I do want to note that we have greatly expanded the number of SDKs that we offer over the past year or so. I'm not sure which framework you were using when you tried it out, but we may have better support for it now! You can see all our supported SDKs if you scroll down in the docs: https://clerk.com/docs
Head of support at Clerk here, can confirm this is accurate. We're right at the finish line with a project that will give you a secure export of your full user data through the dashboard without needing to email support as well.
We are very committed internally to making sure that folks using Clerk are doing so because they want to be, not because we have made it difficult to leave.
Vercel is fairly clear about where it runs your code - depending on the type of page/deployment its going to be either S3, Lambda, or a cloudflare edge worker. There is a ton of logic behind how deployments work but the general benefit of using a service like Vercel is basically exactly as described above -- you push your code and it just works and you don't worry about it.
This is an attractive prospect for a lot of folks who want to spend their time making their apps better and not building/monitoring infrastructure. However, there are some folks who really like to build and maintain their own infra and in that case a service like Vercel might not be the best fit.
We have been using datocms heavily at my company for a variety of projects, and have been beyond impressed by how robust and well-thought-out the platform is, and how responsive the staff are to bugs and feature requests. I spend a LOT of time evaluating headless CMS' as part of my job, and Dato is a standout option - one that I recommend as a top choice to anyone who asks, and as an inspiration when I speak with reps from other companies building headless cms'. To be clear I am not employed by or have any partnership with dato at all, just a big fan of their work : )
