Auth0 is a great product. So is Clerk. But at scale, both get expensive fast. Auth0 can run into hundreds of dollars a month once you cross certain MAU thresholds. Clerk charges per user. If you are building a multi-tenant SaaS, those numbers compound quickly.

I spent a long time looking for an alternative. Something with JWT rotation, RBAC, webhooks, audit logs, and multi-tenancy baked in. I could not find one that covered the full surface, so I built it.

What HVT is

HVT is a self-hostable authentication platform. You run it yourself for free, or use the managed cloud version at hvts.app . It is licensed under AGPL v3.

The core model is: Organisation → Project → API key → Runtime token.

Each app or environment gets its own project. Runtime users (your app's end users) are isolated per project.…