Guide

React Hooks for Multi-Tenancy and Authorization w/ PropelAuth

Say you built a SaaS application for restaurants to track information about their orders. There are multiple people at the restaurants who need access to this information. There’s an owner, there are managers, and there are frontline employees who need access too. Each of these users will have different

Founder

Not Another Cold Email: How to successfully ask for product feedback

It takes a village to raise a child start a company. Whether you’re looking for user testimonials, searching for beta testers, or trying to expand your network, as a founder, it can seem like you’re constantly asking for help. If you’re an introvert, you might dread sending

Authentication

Roles and Permissions in Plain English

Let’s say you build newspaper websites for local newspapers. Your simplest product is a newspaper website where everyone can post articles and everyone can read them. That’s not good.

Coding

Drawing a Turkey with CSS

We learned how to generate arbitrary shapes with CSS. We then learned how to scale, rotate, and position those shapes in order to create your own artwork. While you probably shouldn’t create giant works of art in pure CSS, you can use these techniques to add a little more pizzazz to your designs.

Founder

Should You Turn Your Side Project Into a Business?

Say you’ve been building an app as a side project over the past year. Maybe it started out as a hobby to take your mind off of your day job or perhaps it’s an idea that’s been lingering in your head for years. But now you have

RBAC

Adding Customizable Roles and Permissions to PropelAuth

We’re happy to share the latest update to PropelAuth—adding more customizability to role based access control (RBAC), so you can have full control over what your users can see and do within your product.

Founder

The Startup Founder’s Gift Guide

Being a founder isn’t easy, but it doesn’t have to be all hard work and no play. Whether they’re still crafting their mission statement or about to start a fundraising round, here are ten gift ideas to make the entrepreneur in your life feel extra special.

Product

Should You Disable Public Signups?

By manually onboarding your users, you can invite selected users while keeping your product private to the greater public. In this blog we’ll highlight different scenarios where it’s beneficial to disable public signups for your company.

Next.js

How We Incrementally Migrated to Next.js and Vercel

Recently, we switched our marketing site over to Next.js and Vercel. Our frontend developers are able to create designs in a format they are already comfortable with (CSS and React). Our marketing team is happy that they can make changes without needing an engineer in the loop.

Guide

Serverless Multi-Tenant Python Apps Made Easy with Chalice and PropelAuth

Serverless functions are very powerful but historically have a poor developer experience. Chalice allows us to quickly deploy API routes with very little code. When combined with PropelAuth—we can have a full enterprise-ready multi-tenant application quickly and easily.

Authentication

Understanding Auth Terminology with Examples Part Two

In our first post, we defined some common auth terminology to help clarify the jargon used when discussing ‘auth’. There’s no shortage of terminology, so here’s part two of commonly used words. Magic Link/Passwordless Passwordless login is just that—a login without a password. Because most users

Product

Custom Organization Naming

When users sign up for your product, do they sign up as individuals or in groups? If you are building a B2B product, they likely sign up in groups alongside their coworkers. But what do you call these groups?

Coding

Generating Chess Puzzles with Genetic Algorithms

We took a library used for function minimization, attached Stockfish to it, and used it to generate surprisingly complex mate in 3 chess puzzles without too much code. Libraries like this excite me because it feels like the limit is your imagination and your ability to transform ideas into code.

SSO

ELI5: SAML

Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) is an authentication feature that grants users access to different company web applications using their employee login credentials.

Guide

Instant Multi-Tenant GraphQL APIs with PostGraphile, RLS, and PropelAuth

GraphQL is a query language for APIs that can help your engineering team move faster. Just one set of developers can build and maintain the overall schema, and everyone else gets a friendly interface for accessing/mutating the data. The queries are written like this: { hero { name height } } And it

Coding

This Menu Takes 20 Seconds to Scroll Through

A common cycle that products go through is: Someone builds an easy to use, slightly opinionated product. It gains adoption because it perfectly solves a problem for a set of users.

Authentication

Why B2B Companies Waste More Time on Authentication

B2B companies have a lot of additional user authentication needs than B2C. You start with an organization ID and an invitation flow, and slowly you are adding roles and self-service UIs, and org-aware middleware.

Case Study

How PropelAuth Solved Elegant’s B2B Auth Needs

One of the many pressing questions that every new company must determine is, “When should we implement auth?” And, soon after, “Should I build auth myself or use a service provider?” When Trey Holterman was co-founding Elegant, a startup helping business teams build and send personalized insight reports to users,

Authentication

Azure AD SAML Connections in One Click

SAML enables our customers to provide Enterprise SSO within their products in a single click. Earlier this week we launched with support for many of the other top identity providers, like Okta, JumpCloud, and OneLogin and are happy to add Azure AD to the list.

Authentication

PropelAuth Launches Self-service SAML

We’re excited to say that our SAML (also called Enterprise SSO) implementation is out of beta and now available to all our customers! This feature allows your customers to log in to your product using their existing identity provider, like Okta, Google, OneLogin, and more.

Authentication

JWT Authentication Explained with Code Examples

When I’m trying to understand a concept, I like to play around with relevant libraries. We’ll try this out with JWTs using the popular javascript library jsonwebtoken.

Coding

The Importance of Product Led Growth for Dev Tools

Product led growth (PLG) is a fairly simple concept. It’s the idea that your product should be the driving force of your company’s growth. Your product should be good enough that it can stand on its own merits. Your customers will recommend it to others and advocate for it.

Guide

Nine Apps that are Free and Essential for Early-stage Startups

If you’ve just started your own company or are thinking about becoming an entrepreneur, the currently downward trending economic climate is probably top of mind. Established Unicorns are laying off employees or placing hiring freezes to extend their runway and on the venture capital side, wallets are tightening and

Next.js

Multi-Tenant Next.js App with Prisma and PropelAuth

In this post, we’ll show how to build a multi-tenant application using Next.js, Prisma, and PropelAuth. We’ll build a simple B2B application where each user can make "posts" within a tenant.

Product

Updates to Our Hosted Auth Pages

We’re excited to share new user interface (UI) and feature updates to our hosted auth pages! These are the UIs that we host on your behalf for your users.