Yolotp I: The Announcement

Lumpcorp’s first portfolio project, Yolotp, is live now.

(Ed: Strictly speaking, at this very moment Yolotp is experiencing an outage and hence not live. But one of the advantages of blogging in total obscurity is that by the time anyone actually reads this, it will be live again.)

It’s an auth platform, providing only one auth flow: one-time passwords (OTP). You’ve probably used this flow before, even if the phrase is unfamiliar. It’s when an app sends you a short code to log in, rather than asking for a password.

From the developer perspective, it’s a pain to implement OTP, particularly for new or small projects where auth is a requirement but not the focal point. Any developer who has set up a new project has experienced the annoyance of spending an outsized share of their time and effort getting auth working.

Not with Yolotp. (The tagline is, “life’s too short for confusing auth infra.”) Without exaggeration, I suspect Yolotp is the simplest auth system in existence. In a new project, it can be implemented in under 10 minutes. The documentation is less than a page long. If you get stuck setting it up, my personal cell phone number is on the dashboard’s support page. Call me—the guy who built it—and we’ll figure out the problem.

But the benefits aren’t solely for your developer team. If you can choose only one auth flow, OTP has the best UX and security for the largest number of users. The Yolotp homepage has more info on this, but the advantages of OTP distill down to:

1. Fast, simple, and secure. Even for the ~65 percent of internet users without password managers.
2. Works for literally every human. Unlike social auth (GitHub, Google, etc).

From now on, my projects will generally use Yolotp for auth. Look out for the “Powered by Yolotp” footer in your login emails. I’m still working on opening the site to everybody else, but that will be done by the end of January.