You’ve hit the fork in the road every engineering team reaches eventually:

“Should we build our auth system… or just buy one?”

It sounds simple. But when authentication underpins your entire user experience — and security posture — the decision gets complex fast.

Why Teams Try to Build

• Full control over UX and logic

• Perceived cost savings (no vendor fees)

• Tight integration with existing stack

• “It’s just login… how hard can it be?”

Why Building Auth Rarely Stays Simple

• Social login? Add a week.

• Role-based access? Another week.

• Multi-tenant support? Good luck.

• Audit logs, staging environments, CI/CD testing, ACLs? That’s a team, not a feature.

Auth isn’t a checkbox — it’s a surface area. Every edge case you miss now becomes tech debt (or worse, a security risk) later.

What ‘Buying’ Really Means Today

• You’re not just “outsourcing” auth — you’re buying infrastructure.

• When done right, a modern platform should:

  • Adapt to your workflows

  • Version and deploy like code

  • Let you own the logic without owning all the complexity

Where Prefactor Lands

Prefactor was built for teams that don’t want to reinvent the wheel — but still want to own the road. You get:

• Unified authn/authz/audit

• CI/CD alignment

• A DSL to define and deploy access policies

• Zero compromise on control

Whether you build or buy — the real question is:

Are you setting up your auth to scale with your product?

Email Hello@prefactor.tech and join the early access programme today.