How are you handling authentication & payments?

I've used Firebase and Stripe. But you have to write a lot of stuff on top of both to get to something that works. Neither is purely out-of-the-box, especially Stripe.

We don't do auth but just launched something to handle subscriptions and feature management on top of Stripe - mightydash.com. Lmk if you want help with getting payments setup

I'm... writing a SaaS starter kit that will come with authentication and subscriptions out of the box, actually. I got sick of writing the same stuff every time I started a new app, so I figured I'd write it once properly and be done with it. Then, since it was already written to be extended into really any SaaS, I could sell it and hopefully speed up fellow SaaS founders' time-to-market.

For user auth, I'm using JWTs stored in HTTPS secure cookies (much easier to make safe than when stored in localstorage), and for subscriptions, I'm starting with Stripe, though I want to implement PayPal eventually, since Stripe is easy, but PayPal is popular.

Firebase Auth and Stripe is working great for me

Another +1 for Firebase and Stripe.

What aren't you happy with?

I use a boilerplate (https://usegravity.app) which is JWT and Stripe.

Theres also plugin subscription engines like PayHere - depends on what you need. Is it one shot payments or subscription?

I'm sure you should try https://tabbli.com/solutions/solution-default-universal-template/
Everything you are looking for in one flacon

+1 on Firebase Auth and Stripe. You can fetch the Stripe webhooks with Firebase Cloud Functions and store the retrieved user information in the Firestore database. So your user information will always be up to date. You simply have to check the user in the Firestore database when you load the application and see which plan he is on.

I have used Stripe and MangoPay but I prefer Stripes API and doc