Firebase Auth, Auth0, and Clerk are all solid products. If you need authentication up and running in an afternoon and you never want to think about it again, any of them will do the job. But there is a problem none of them will tell you about: you do not own any of them. Your user data lives on their servers. Their pricing teams decide what you pay next year. Their roadmaps decide what features you get. And if any of them go down, change their terms, or get acquired and rebranded into something unrecognisable, which has already happened with Auth0 and Okta, you are along for the ride whether you like it or not. That is a problem HVT was built to solve. What the alternatives actually cost you Firebase Auth is the easiest to get started with, which is exactly why so many teams default to it. But it is a Google product, closed-source, and there is no self-hosted option. Your user data sits on Google's infrastructure permanently.…