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Product27 January 2025·3 min read

Defending against bad actors: Paycux Radar vs Castle vs Auth0 vs Stytch vs Arcjet

Shipping is the easy half.

Paycux engineering

Shipping is the easy half. The hard half is deciding what the thing is supposed to do for someone who has never read your roadmap and does not care about your architecture.

This piece walks through how we think about it at Paycux, what we have changed our minds about, and where the sharp edges are.

What you should be looking for

What you should be looking for deserves its own treatment. Defaults are the product. Most people will never open the settings screen, which means the behaviour you chose for them is the behaviour they will experience forever.

Naming is design work. If the team argues about what to call something, the disagreement is usually about what it is, and shipping before that is settled means shipping the confusion to customers.

Paycux Radar

Paycux Radar is where this gets concrete. Defaults are the product. Most people will never open the settings screen, which means the behaviour you chose for them is the behaviour they will experience forever.

Naming is design work. If the team argues about what to call something, the disagreement is usually about what it is, and shipping before that is settled means shipping the confusion to customers.

  • Choose defaults as carefully as features
  • Settle the name before you ship the thing
  • Ship the smallest honest version
  • Say plainly what the feature does not do

Castle

Consider castle. Defaults are the product. Most people will never open the settings screen, which means the behaviour you chose for them is the behaviour they will experience forever.

Defaults are the product. Most people will never open the settings screen, which means the behaviour you chose for them is the behaviour they will experience forever.

Auth0

Consider auth0. Defaults are the product. Most people will never open the settings screen, which means the behaviour you chose for them is the behaviour they will experience forever.

Defaults are the product. Most people will never open the settings screen, which means the behaviour you chose for them is the behaviour they will experience forever.

Naming is design work.

Stytch

Stytch deserves its own treatment. Naming is design work. If the team argues about what to call something, the disagreement is usually about what it is, and shipping before that is settled means shipping the confusion to customers.

Defaults are the product. Most people will never open the settings screen, which means the behaviour you chose for them is the behaviour they will experience forever.

Arcjet

Consider arcjet. Naming is design work. If the team argues about what to call something, the disagreement is usually about what it is, and shipping before that is settled means shipping the confusion to customers.

Defaults are the product. Most people will never open the settings screen, which means the behaviour you chose for them is the behaviour they will experience forever.

Which should you choose?

Which should you choose? deserves its own treatment. Naming is design work. If the team argues about what to call something, the disagreement is usually about what it is, and shipping before that is settled means shipping the confusion to customers.

Defaults are the product. Most people will never open the settings screen, which means the behaviour you chose for them is the behaviour they will experience forever.

Where this leaves us

If there is one thing worth taking away, it is that the expensive decisions are the ones made implicitly. Making them on purpose costs an afternoon.

If you are working through the same problem and want to compare notes, the docs cover the mechanics and the console shows the behaviour on your own data.

Everything here, already built

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Start selling to enterprise customers

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