What's up with Auth.js?

You might have noticed that Auth.js/NextAuth.js progress has slowed down significantly lately. Let me try to explain a bit more.

When I took over the original project's maintenance, I was still a university student, had no financial obligations to pay down an apartment, sleeping was a second thought, and I got enough socializing through school and my early job next to the university. I was young(er), and filled with the "vibe founder mode" energy that was needed by the project. My days and nights were filled thinking about shipping. I cooked code even in my dreams. I had extremely big expectations for myself and for the project, growing out of the Next.js ecosystem and become the de-facto auth solution for every major JS framework. (Hence the name, Auth.js. Read on the naming story here).

Now a lot has changed since then. I joined my dream company, I went through depression, and I slowly realized that working late into the night after a full day of work took an increasingly big toll on my personal life. Coming out of a depression, I felt that I was going into another one. My therapy sessions started revolving around mean comments by faceless Internet characters and delivering unreachable expectations that I set for myself.

As I developed new relationships, got new friends, and found new hobbies, those things naturally started to bring me more joy than Auth.js ever could.

I say with confidence though, that I am very proud of what I achieved. Everyone who ever reached out to say so, I thank you! I've overlooked this project grow from a few thousand monthly downloads to 6.000.000+. It has been downloaded more than 100.000.000 times. Only considering our most popular integration (NextAuth.js), - if you trust NPM downloads - it is installed in ~15% of all Next.js apps.

Over the past years, I have helped the Twitter (X) team build out their OAuth 2.0 support by giving early feedback, helping LinkedIn and other big companies fix their spec compliance, and most importantly provided a free, open-source library to millions of users.

I have never really compiled a list of companies that used Auth.js, but I can assure you that there are many, and most likely, you have used at least one of them (ChatGPT).

So believe me when I say this, it is with a heavy heart that I came to announce, my contributions to the Auth.js project is halted indefinitely.

If you or your company heavily relies on the project and wrote me an email, tagged me on GitHub - or planned to do so - I would like to apologize for not answering.

I would like to thank every single company and individual who has ever contributed financially, or otherwise to make this project possible!

Final note: The project is not going anywhere, the other maintainers will continue contributing, but I personally have no capacity to do so in my current life situation.