DEV Community: Alex Rapp

Kick Off Next.js Conf with a Hackathon in SF (Oct 21)

Alex Rapp — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 18:55:49 +0000

Hey Dev.to community! Alex from Clerk here.
If you're heading to Next.js Conf in San Francisco later this month, I wanted to share something we're really excited about: Clerk is hosting the official opening hackathon on Tuesday, October 21st.

This is a Shark Tank-style competition where teams of developers (up to 8 people per team) will build an app from scratch in under 5 hours. Here's how it works:

Submit your idea as part of pre0registration - if selected, you become a team "founder" and lead your squad
Get assigned to a team if your idea isn't picked (everyone participates!)
Build fast - 9am to 2:30pm with breakfast and lunch provided
Demo your work - 5 minutes in front of a judge panel including investors from CRV & Madrona
Win prizes - Keychron keyboards for the winning team, plus custom Clerk & v0 keycaps + other swag for all participants

Beyond the prize & swag, this is a chance to:

Network before the conference: meet other developers heading to Next.js Conf
Actually ship something: there's nothing like a deadline to force execution
Get comfortable with pitching - you'll demo in front of industry judges and be featured on CodeTV (they're filming everything)
Transition into the party: after the hackathon, the space becomes Sanity's Next.js Conf opening party

Jason Lengstorf from CodeTV is hosting, so you know it's going to be a good time.

Important Details

FREE to participate but pre-registration is required
Event is in-person only
Limited to 12 teams only
9:00 AM - 5:00 PM PDT
Register here for full details

If you've got an app idea you've been sitting on, this is your chance to bring it to life alongside other developers in a friendly (but competitive!) environment.

Hope to see you there! Drop a comment if you're planning to attend

It just got easier to customize Clerk UI components

Alex Rapp — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 15:34:04 +0000

Clerk now supports theming via CSS variables and has a dedicated shadcn/ui theme that automatically matches your application's existing shadcn/ui theme configuration.

In this conversation, Hamed Bahram and Alex Carpenter discuss the new features and enhancements in Clerk UI components, focusing on:

They explore how developers can customize the look and feel of their applications using various theming options, including prebuilt themes and the new simple theme that simplifies customization.

The discussion also highlights the dynamic support for light and dark modes, making it easier for developers to create visually appealing applications that align with user preferences.

Learn more about Clerk's shadcn/ui theme compatibility here.

TL;DR

The SDK team aimed to enhance the theming capabilities of Clerk components.
CSS variable support allows for more modern theming approaches.
The ShadCN theme supports automatic light and dark mode switching.
Developers can define Clerk-specific CSS variables in their stylesheets.
The simple theme provides a bare-bones approach for easier customization.
Clerk components can adapt to user-defined CSS variables for dynamic theming.
Targeting specific elements allows for granular control over UI components.
Prebuilt themes simplify the theming process for developers.
The transition to the new theme system is designed to be non-breaking.
Future updates will focus on improving light and dark mode support for default themes.

Clerk Billing Live Demo + AMA

Alex Rapp — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 19:43:45 +0000

Join the Clerk Commerce team this Friday at 1PM ET on X (@ClerkDev) for a live demo of Clerk Billing.

We'll demonstrate how to set it up, discuss upcoming features, and be available to answer all your questions.

What is Clerk Billing?

Clerk Billing takes the same incredible DX we built for implementing authentication and applies it to recurring subscription logic to help you quickly monetize your products.

Configuring Subscriptions from the Clerk dashboard is simple:

Create your plans
Add the features associated with the plans
Enable Billing

You can add the new <PricingTable /> component to create a pricing page customized for your plans and your customers can manage their subscriptions directly through our profile components.

You can even gate features based on the plan/tier that a user is subscribed to using the has helper to confirm access before rendering the content.

Clerk Billing easily syncs with new or existing Organizations, unlocking B2B subscription functionality.

Learn more about Clerk Billing, see an example project, or simply join our live demo this Friday.

Getting started with Clerk Billing

Alex Rapp — Mon, 19 May 2025 19:19:29 +0000

In this episode of Stripe Developer Office Hours, Braden Sidoti, CTO and co-founder of Clerk, shares how to build a complete Stripe Billing experience without:

Webhooks
Custom UIs
Stripe session juggling

Instead of abstracting Stripe Billing, Clerk connects directly to your Stripe account—letting Stripe handle payments, while Clerk handles:

✅ Prebuilt billing UIs
✅ Session-aware entitlement logic
✅ Identity-tied subscriptions and upgrades

⸻

🧠 What You’ll Learn

How to implement subscription + usage-based pricing
How to support org-level billing and role-based access
How to give users a secure self-service portal with zero custom code
Why auth + billing belong in the same layer of your stack

If you’re building a SaaS app and want to ship payments faster without duct tape, this is the blueprint you’ve been looking for. All of it works out-of-the-box with Next.js, React, or any modern frontend.

Clerk Billing works in every country supported by Stripe and syncs directly with your existing Clerk application.

🚀 Try Clerk Billing today!

Early access opportunity: Test OAuth Access Tokens & machine auth in Clerk

Alex Rapp — Fri, 02 May 2025 19:33:41 +0000

EDIT (6/23/25): This beta testing program has ended. In thanks to all that contributed, we're excited to announce the release of OAuth Provider Improvements. You can learn more here -> https://clerk.com/changelog/2025-06-13-oauth-improvements

We’re kicking off an early access program for Clerk’s OAuth Access Token feature. This feature is part of a suite of machine authentication features that we plan to roll out in private beta over the coming weeks.

Both M2M and OAuth are fairly loaded terms that can represent multiple, entirely different use cases, so we want to try to clarify what exactly we have available for testing, and what else we're working on in this message so that you don't end up spending your time trying to test something that's different than what you actually needed 😁

We plan to release three features over the coming months, all of which fall into the category of "machine authentication":

OAuth Access Tokens: Users with existing accounts on your app can explicitly grant access to a third party app to make calls into your app's API on their behalf. The process through which the third party app requests access, the user consents, the access token is delivered, and the token expires and is refreshed is defined by the OAuth spec. You have perhaps gone through a flow like this via an app like facebook or twitter, where you see a screen like "X is requesting access to Y", and it lists out some permissions like reading your tweets, or posting tweets on your behalf, etc, and you can click "accept" - that is the flow we're building here. There are other, entirely different flows that are also defined by the OAuth spec as well, we are not covering all of them, just the one described above. It's worth noting that MCP auth relies on this specific OAuth flow, however, the MCP auth spec is still a draft, so it's not quite ready to put into place with most major LLM clients quite yet. We plan to fully support MCP auth through this feature, likely even before the spec is finalized.

API Keys: Users with accounts on your app can generate API keys which allow a non-user entity, whether a script, a CI process, a third party app, etc. to make calls into your app's API on the user's behalf. These keys would primarily be generated by users via a new tab in the component.

Machine to Machine Tokens: Developers working on apps using Clerk can create M2M tokens using the backend API, which can be used, for example, for authenticating calls between different backend services. These tokens are not scoped to a specific user by default and are intended for use by app developers, rather than end users.

The feature we are ready to open up for early testing today is the first one in the list above, OAuth Access Tokens. If you have a use case in mind for this, or would just like to take it for a spin and offer feedback, we'd be delighted by this. Here's what you need to do:

Navigate to dashboard.clerk.com
If you're not an existing Clerk user, sign up free of cost and go through our Quickstart guide
Once you've identified the app you'd like to use for testing, capture your Instance ID. Navigate within the app's dashboard, click Configure > Settings (Under Application) > Copy Instance ID. Instance ID will look something like this ins_8qZzLxVv99TtMmKkRr23NnBbAa
Email jeff@clerk.com with subject "OAuth Beta Test" and include your Clerk Instance ID

We'll turn the feature on for your instance and reply with docs to guide you.

If you are more interested in one of the other features described above, stay tuned - we're working hard on getting them out the door as well and we will have another update for you very soon. If you'd like to jump on a call with one of us who are working on the project to chat about anything related as well, we'd be delighted to do that. Just send an email to jeff@clerk.dev and we’ll get it scheduled.

Thanks so much for your interest in machine auth with Clerk, and we're looking forward to getting this released and in your hands! 🚀

Clerk + Shopify: Elevating Customer Authentication for E-Commerce

Alex Rapp — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 20:35:34 +0000

We’re excited to announce that Clerk now integrates with Shopify, giving merchants a fully customizable authentication platform with social and biometric sign-in methods, multi-factor authentication (MFA), session management and more. Merchants with a Shopify Plus plan can start utilizing this integration today by setting up Clerk as an identity provider (IdP) in the Shopify admin console.

With Clerk’s platform, Shopify merchants can:

Support social sign-in options - preferred by 53% of users and proven to convert 1.3x faster than passwords

Enable passkey authentication, allowing customers to securely log in using device biometrics or PINs - eliminating forgotten passwords and preventing credential stuffing attacks

Enhance security with MFA, blocking 99.9% of account takeover attempts

Offload session management, taking advantage of features like active device monitoring and instant session revocation for improved security

Unify authentication across multiple storefronts and external apps, simplifying management and supporting business expansion

We’re thrilled to bring Clerk’s authentication capabilities to Shopify’s ecosystem, and we can’t wait to see how merchants use these tools to create secure, frictionless shopping experiences.

Read our documentation to get started.