Better Auth acquired by Vercel

Better Auth was acquired by Vercel on July 7, 2026. Bereket Engida and the core team joined to keep building the framework and to lead Vercel's work on identity for AI agents.

The library stays free, MIT licensed, and keeps its name and community governance.

How it started

Bereket is self-taught. He started programming at 18 after a friend turned down his request for help on an e-commerce search app, so he built it himself. Across the jobs that followed he kept hitting the same wall: every auth provider was either too rigid or too expensive to scale. Organizations, roles, teams — basic SaaS needs that meant building from scratch anyway.

So he built Better Auth: authentication you install into your own codebase, running against your own database. No vendor, no lock-in, no user data on someone else's servers.

He wrote the whole thing in Addis Ababa, before he had ever been to the United States.

The number

Weekly npm downloads went from 150,000 in June 2025 to 4.7 million by July 2026. Roughly 31× in twelve months, with 850+ contributors on the repo.

Two years, bedroom to Vercel.