Val Town has migrated from Clerk to Better Auth for authentication, closing an issue that had been open for roughly three years. The platform initially chose Clerk in 2023 when moving away from Supabase, but quickly ran into fundamental architectural conflicts. Clerk's model of owning the users table and session management proved problematic for Val Town's social features.

Two major pain points drove the switch: severe rate limiting and complete dependency on Clerk's uptime. The authentication provider capped API calls at 5 requests per second per account, which couldn't support Val Town's social features requiring multiple user lookups per page. More critically, when Clerk experienced outages, the entire Val Town site became unusable since Clerk managed all user sessions.

Despite Clerk's commercial success—having raised $50 million and serving many satisfied customers—the operational constraints became untenable. Val Town selected Better Auth for its open-source foundation, code quality, and self-hosted approach that keeps session management independent. The transition took two weeks with LLM assistance handling the dual-provider migration.

The author notes this is their second auth switch in two years, cautioning against making such changes casually. For simpler frontend apps without social components, Clerk remains a solid choice.