How Fern is growing securely with Auth0 and AWS
Industry
Software/Startup
Region
AMER
About
Fern helps teams deliver SDKs and API docs they're proud to share. Since launching in 2023, Fern has been trusted by 150+ companies, including industry leaders like Block, Webflow, ElevenLabs, LaunchDarkly, Alchemy, and Intercom, to power world-class developer experiences.
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225%
growth in daily logins in 2024-25
Delivering APIs developers love
Great developer experiences drive product adoption, but many APIs create friction and complexity for users. Fern changes that. The Brooklyn-based startup automates SDK and documentation generation, making it easier for its clients to ship developer-friendly APIs. The company has significantly grown its customer base since launching in 2023, with leading names like Square, Webflow, ElevenLabs, LaunchDarkly, and Intercom using the platform to save time and lift the load on in-house teams.
The company wanted a partner that could secure its users, support its growth and integrate cleanly with its existing AWS stack. It turned to Auth0.
“Identity was critical for the development process. Many users access Fern through GitHub, and a lot will have their documentation set up to be open source. We needed to make sure these sites in production could be updated only by authenticated members of a given organization.”
— Catherine Deskur, Deployed Engineer
Putting identity in trusted hands
With many competing priorities in the run-up to launch, building an identity solution in-house was a burden Fern didn’t need.
“It would have taken us months to get the feature completeness we’d need to be SOC 2 compliant,” says CEO and co-founder Danny Sheridan.
“We loved being able to hand that off to a vendor, so we didn’t have to worry about it anymore.” With Auth0, Fern had an identity solution up and running in 7 days.
“Managing users and organizations is table stakes. By building on Auth0, we skipped the undifferentiated heavy lifting of auth and focused our time on features our customers actually care about.”
— Danny Sheridan, Co-founder and CEO
Security without friction
Secure access and a seamless user experience are critical for Fern. Auth0’s Social Login allows Fern’s users to authenticate using their existing GitHub credentials, removing friction from the signup process. Once access is authorized via OAuth 2.0, an Auth0 account is automatically created and linked to the user’s GitHub identity.
This account manages access control, granting the user permissions to view their organization’s SDKs and documentation.
Beyond login, Auth0’s built-in protections, like rate limiting to block repeated login attempts, help keep the platform secure. The company also integrated Auth0 into its systems to build a dashboard where users can invite others from their organization. Once they click the ‘add user’ button, all identity data is securely sent to Auth0. “Managing users and organizations just works,” says Danny.
Customization supports new business
Customization capabilities were important for Fern as a developer-centric company.
Their team values the ability to tailor the authentication experience, changing the colors, logo and theme to be consistent with Fern’s brand. “It doesn’t feel like you’re jumping to another website,” says Danny. “It feels like Fern’s online property.”
Fern is also using Auth0’s extensibility as part of its go-to-market efforts. When a new user creates an account, an Auth0 Action triggers an event-based alert in a dedicated Slack channel, notifying the sales team. “It lets us know when customers are trying our product, so we can connect with them immediately,” says Danny.
Building on AWS, innovating with AI
As Fern uses AWS to power its infrastructure, it needed Auth0 to work seamlessly with Fern’s existing AWS tools. The integration with Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon’s metric- gathering and monitoring tool, has proved useful. “It was very easy to set up Auth0 logs to be consumed in a much larger database, instead of being isolated,” says Danny. “If ever we have an event that impacts customers, we can now quickly diagnose where in the system there are failures, and quickly resolve any customer-facing issues.”
The company is also seeing exponential growth in AI usage for their ‘Ask Fern’ product, powered by AWS Bedrock. Ask Fern offers an AI chat experience for users accessing documentation, allowing them to ask questions and find answers instantly. “Today, some of our customers are having 1,000s of questions a day asked to their documentation,” says Danny. “AI-powered chat is going to become the primary way people interact with the documentation.” To support this growth securely, the team uses a multilayered approach combining core Auth0 authentication with Amazon Bedrock’s built-in security features.
A springboard for growth
AWS and Auth0’s startup programs have played a key role in helping Fern get off the ground. AWS provided $100,000 in credits on top of a free tier, while Auth0 helped the company launch without upfront costs. “It reduced the barrier to getting started,” says Danny. “We didn’t need a big meeting to discuss if we wanted to spend thousands of dollars on software.”
Fern’s partnership with Auth0 and AWS has allowed them to focus on building their product and selling to customers without distraction. “We’ll continue to pick tools that let us focus on our core responsibility, which is helping companies offer easy-to-use APIs and be developer-friendly.”
Ready to build something big together?
To learn more and apply for a free year of Auth0 for your startup, visit https://auth0.com/startups