How PlugBear Scaled to 1500 Organizations in 4 Months With PropelAuth
PlugBear is a no-code solution that allows users to integrate their custom AI apps with familiar tools like Slack, MS Teams, or HubSpot. It enables seamless integration of custom LLM apps into communication channels, enhancing user experiences. Users can develop a working Proof of Concept in less than an hour, significantly reducing development time!
Liam Hwang, PlugBear’s co-founder and CTO, has firsthand experience with rolling his own auth, and knew that that wasn’t the path they wanted to take for PlugBear. While it would be easy to get something up and running quickly, they’d pay for it later in maintenance costs:
"I've personally built dozens of apps utilizing reliable open-source authentication libraries. However... integrating with SAML or SSO can become burdensome as we grow."
-Liam Hwang, PlugBear Co-Founder & CTO
He tried a few other providers, but found that they were lacking the support PlugBear needed for organization management. When it comes to multi-tenant authentication, there are a lot of extra considerations: RBAC, invite flows, organization-level policies, etc. Some auth tools lack these features… others charge quite a bit for them.
"We previously used Supabase, which was straightforward and reliable, but it lacked the organizational support we needed for our B2B SaaS. Auth0 was another option we tried; however, we found it complex and expensive, especially for organization support."
-Liam Hwang, PlugBear Co-Founder & CTO
Once they decided to switch to PropelAuth, they were able to get up and running quickly:
"The implementation process was straightforward, only taking a few hours to get it working. The Next.js backend documentation was particularly helpful. Having access to the SDK codebase was beneficial for customizing some of the flow."
-Liam Hwang, PlugBear Co-Founder & CTO
After that, it was only a short time before they were able to release their MVP and start signing up users:
"PropelAuth enabled us to build and launch our MVP within a week, and we have scaled to 1,500 organizations in four months without authentication issues."
-Liam Hwang, PlugBear Co-Founder & CTO
PropelAuth’s usefulness didn’t stop at the launch of their MVP. PlugBear also uses PropelAuth’s user management features - particularly user impersonation - to help keep things running smoothly:
"The impersonation feature of PropelAuth is particularly valuable, as it helps us effectively handle customer inquiries by letting us see the issues from their perspective."
-Liam Hwang, PlugBear Co-Founder & CTO
So what’s next for PlugBear?
"We aim to continue enhancing our platform to make AI more customizable and easily integrable for teams. By doing so, we hope to empower a broad spectrum of teams to innovate and improve their workflows."
-Liam Hwang, PlugBear Co-Founder & CTO
To learn more about how PlugBear can make it easy for you to integrate custom LLM apps into communication channels, check out their website.
To learn more about how PropelAuth can help you launch and grow your startup quickly, check out our website.