Joining FusionAuth

I wanted to let y’all know that I’ve joined FusionAuth as a developer advocate. I’ll be working to help our customers succeed and promote the virtues of standards based user management systems. I get to write a lot of content and example applications against a full featured API.

I’ve built enough systems to know two things:

• Users and their behavior are almost always a key part of any software application.
• User management is difficult to get right, especially if you want to use secure best practices and standards such as OAuth.

FusionAuth wants to elevate everyone’s user identity management system. The community edition is free and will always be. (It’s important to note that it is free as in beer, not free as in speech, but almost all of the development happens in the open.) If you want to run FusionAuth on your own forever, that’s great! You get a secure user store that supports OAuth, SAML and two factor authentication, free forever. We’ll happily provide you “best effort” support in our forums and we’ve seen the community help each other out too (most notably in the creation of helm charts to run FusionAuth on Kubernetes).

If, on the other hand, you find value in FusionAuth and want guaranteed support, custom development, or hosting, we’re happy to sell that to you. The price is often a fraction of the other solutions out there. Another differentiator for FusionAuth is that you can host it wherever you want: in your data center, in your cloud, or on our cloud servers. Not every client needs that level of control, but many do.

I really love the business model of providing a ton of value to your end users and monetizing only a small percentage of them with unique needs. (I’ve been involved in this type of business before.) The business thrives and there’s a ton of consumer surplus generated.

I’m really excited about this opportunity. It’s a nimble company with a passionate team based in Denver. If you need a user identity management system built from the ground up for developer happiness, please check us out.