Clerk authenticates, Convex do user management and features. Convex stores user data

Could you tell me more about why you feel so strongly about building all your own UI? This is the biggest sticking point - I hear that you want to use an auth service because you can trust it's secure, and that's valid. However, many folks don't quite realize just how much effort it is to build good authentication UIs. We have a team of full time engineers working on our UIs and have been working on them for years. The number of different options you need to accommodate, especially as your app grows, is astonishing.

For example, perhaps you start with email/password login. Easy enough, you can make a form for that pretty quick. But now you want to also add the ablility for your users to use a phone number in addition to an email. Then you want to make sure emails or phone numbers are verified before they make the account to combat spam. Now your app is more successful and you are getting a bunch of bot accounts being made, so you need bot detection and bot signup prevention. And also some people are using dumb passwords and getting their accounts hacked and are complaining about it, so now you need password rules and validation in your sign up logic. And then you want to add the ability for folks to sign in with a facebook account. But some facebook accounts don't have an associated email, just a phone number, so when they come back you still want to collect an email for the account to be valid, so you need to make sure when the oauth response returns, you have an additional form stage before account creation is finalized that collects this.

Could you tell me more about why you feel so strongly about building all your own UI? This is the biggest sticking point - I hear that you want to use an auth service because you can trust it's secure, and that's valid. However, many folks don't quite realize just how much effort it is to build good authentication UIs. We have a team of full time engineers working on our UIs and have been working on them for years. The number of different options you need to accommodate, especially as your app grows, is astonishing.

For example, perhaps you start with email/password login. Easy enough, you can make a form for that pretty quick. But now you want to also add the ablility for your users to use a phone number in addition to an email. Then you want to make sure emails or phone numbers are verified before they make the account to combat spam. Now your app is more successful and you are getting a bunch of bot accounts being made, so you need bot detection and bot signup prevention. And also some people are using dumb passwords and getting their accounts hacked and are complaining about it, so now you need password rules and validation in your sign up logic. And then you want to add the ability for folks to sign in with a facebook account. But some facebook accounts don't have an associated email, just a phone number, so when they come back you still want to collect an email for the account to be valid, so you need to make sure when the oauth response returns, you have an additional form stage before account creation is finalized that collects this.

When building yourself, you need to manually add every one of these features, which is very time consuming. Also, any little mistakes or bugs or edge cases in your own logic will result in people not being able to sign up, getting locked out of their accounts, etc, which loses you users.
If you use Clerk's UI, everything works, no matter how crazy your setup is, and it scales up indefinitely, and anything else we add to the platform is automatically supported out of the box for free
If you want to customize the way the UI looks and works to fit your app, there are a bunch of ways to do this from the appearance prop (https://clerk.com/docs/components/customization/overview#appearance-prop) to clerk elements (https://clerk.com/changelog/2024-05-02-elements-beta). If you really want to toe the line, you could dip into custom flows too (https://clerk.com/docs/custom-flows/overview), but we don't recommend this unless there's no other option bc its a lot more work.
If you were able to let go of the requirement to build all your own UI and store all of the Clerk data in convex, everything becomes much easier for you when building your app, and the flow of how you use the tool becomes a lot more straightforward
I do not think that you need to have Clerk's user data in convex in order to be "safe" or to make your app work, at any time. I do fully understand why you feel this way, and this is a line of questioning we get reasonably often because Clerk's auth architecture is fairly unique. But it does work, and if you're gonna use Clerk, you will get the most value leaning into it

When building yourself, you need to manually add every one of these features, which is very time consuming. Also, any little mistakes or bugs or edge cases in your own logic will result in people not being able to sign up, getting locked out of their accounts, etc, which loses you users.
If you use Clerk's UI, everything works, no matter how crazy your setup is, and it scales up indefinitely, and anything else we add to the platform is automatically supported out of the box for free
If you want to customize the way the UI looks and works to fit your app, there are a bunch of ways to do this from the appearance prop (https://clerk.com/docs/components/customization/overview#appearance-prop) to clerk elements (https://clerk.com/changelog/2024-05-02-elements-beta). If you really want to toe the line, you could dip into custom flows too (https://clerk.com/docs/custom-flows/overview), but we don't recommend this unless there's no other option bc its a lot more work.
If you were able to let go of the requirement to build all your own UI and store all of the Clerk data in convex, everything becomes much easier for you when building your app, and the flow of how you use the tool becomes a lot more straightforward
I do not think that you need to have Clerk's user data in convex in order to be "safe" or to make your app work, at any time. I do fully understand why you feel this way, and this is a line of questioning we get reasonably often because Clerk's auth architecture is fairly unique. But it does work, and if you're gonna use Clerk, you will get the most value leaning into it

export interface ExternalAccountJSON extends ClerkResourceJSON {
    object: typeof ObjectType.ExternalAccount;
    provider: string;
    identification_id: string;
    provider_user_id: string;
    approved_scopes: string;
    email_address: string;
    first_name: string;
    last_name: string;
    image_url?: string;
    username: string | null;
    public_metadata?: Record<string, unknown> | null;
    label: string | null;
    verification: VerificationJSON | null;
}

export interface ExternalAccountJSON extends ClerkResourceJSON {
    object: typeof ObjectType.ExternalAccount;
    provider: string;
    identification_id: string;
    provider_user_id: string;
    approved_scopes: string;
    email_address: string;
    first_name: string;
    last_name: string;
    image_url?: string;
    username: string | null;
    public_metadata?: Record<string, unknown> | null;
    label: string | null;
    verification: VerificationJSON | null;
}