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Open Passkey

open-source passkey auth with free "backendless" host

Details

External ID
47820676
Source
HN
Company
—
Product
Open Passkey
Website domain
github.com
Launched
April 19, 2026
Cohort
—
Upvotes
10
Upvotes percentile
0.5919023136246787
Tags
—
Fetched at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Updated at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.

Description

I, like Andrej Karpathy, became super frustrated by how annoying it was to deploy projects that were previously an absolute joy to make with Claude Code. That is why I made open-passkey, an MIT licensed passkey repo with support for 33 languages and frameworks (examples included) that makes adding simple secure auth to a project easy.We are also releasing gateway (https://gateway.locke.id) a "backendless" hosted auth server that frontend apps can consume for free so that you can ship a React or Angular app using a CDN like Netlify without needing to configure a server at all. We are willing to freely share the resources of an AWS t.large instance which should easily support millions of accounts & sessions. This decision was made to improve our velocity when it comes to shipping small apps (it should go without saying that this is not designed for large apps).Open-passkey prioritizes post-quantum algorithms, though they are not supported by browsers yet. On top of Gateway, we also built a simple end-to-end encrypted key value store modeled after localStorage. A simple setItem() and getItem() API that uses PRF with passkeys to store encrypted values on gateway with zero config. This, again, was made to improve our velocity to securely add API keys and stuff to frontend apps without needing to pay for a server to host. Obviously gateway is completely optional and exporting out your users public keys is supported with rp_id verification via domain TXT records.

Enrichment

Theme
self-hosted infrastructure and security tools
Vertical
Security
Function
Dev tools
Audience
Developer
AI stance
Not AI
Project type
Hobby / open-source project
Normalized one-liner
open-source passkey authentication
Manually corrected
False

Could you build this?

Yes It implements standard WebAuthn/FIDO2 passkey ceremonies and packages boilerplate/SDK code across common backend languages. WebAuthn APIs and existing libraries make scaffolding passkey integrations straightforward for an AI assistant.

Discussion

1 comment analyzed.

Concerns raised: No plan for notifying domain owners if service shuts down, Service sustainability dependent on limited AWS credits (~20 months)

Feature requests: Documented plan for service sunsetting and user notification

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one — 218 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #105 of 219 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 172 days after the earliest competitor.

Other launches for this product

Same idea, different domain

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