Every time I ship a project, "add API key auth" turns into another monthly subscription. Vault, Unkey, whatever, they all moved to seat pricing and enterprise contracts. Fine for funded teams, but if you're solo and your project makes under 200 bucks a month, that recurring cost is hard to justify.
I'm building this myself (full disclosure). It does bcrypt hashing locally, rate limiting, instant revocation. About 3 lines of middleware. No gateway, no DNS changes, no proxy. You buy it once.
Haven't written the backend yet. I'm checking if the pitch makes sense before I build anything. If you've dealt with this problem, what would you actually want? And if you'd stick with what you have now, I want to hear that too.
Source: r/indiebiz · by /u/Impossible_Hair_9439