I've been using Keycloak for almost 1 year across freelance projects — large-scale enterprise apps and small side projects alike. The appeal was always the same: it's free, battle-tested, and it works. Until it doesn't. The documentation is a labyrinth. Pages and pages of concepts and configurations that make sense if you already know Keycloak, but are genuinely hostile if you're just trying to get started. But the real breaking point was the math. A DigitalOcean droplet with enough RAM to run Keycloak comfortably costs more than most small projects can justify. And SaaS alternatives like Clerk or Auth0 aren't much better — you're paying per seat, per month, forever, while handing your users' credentials to a third party. So two weeks ago I started building my own. Written in Rust. Running in under 20MB of RAM. This is what I learned. The Landscape Problem Let's talk about numbers.…