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WorkOS expands to feature flags, PlanetScale enters the Postgres wars, and Better Auth raises $5M seed
- Authors
- Name
- Hashim Warren
- @hashim_warren
Launch of the Week
WorkOS, the product authentication platform, launched feature flags during their Summer Launch Week, expanding beyond auth into full-blown product management territory. This new feature lets developers "define, manage, and target features by organization, directly within the WorkOS dashboard".
This nudges WorkOS closer to becoming a comprehensive product platform, in direct competition to LaunchDarkly and Statsig.
The WorkOS homepage is still focused on features like "single sign-on", so the company hasn't fully repositioned itself yet. My guess is that product analytics or experiments is coming next.
Enterprise Watch 🏆
PlanetScale, the MySQL hosting platform, gets the trophy this week for announcing the private preview of PlanetScale for Postgres with a textbook enterprise product launch. The company is ignoring the hobby market, and targeting "production workloads" that demand performance and reliability.
I'm impressed with how enterprisey this launch is. The announcement came with detailed performance benchmarks, technical explanations of their scaling mechanisms, and customer quotes from launch partners like Convex. This launch could be used as Crossing the Chasm case study.
The launch also cleared up why CEO Sam Lambert had a Twitter feud with his now direct competitor, Neon, (see my coverage) and praised his launch partner Convex. When Lambert sparred with Neon's CEO about database reliability, PlanetScale was already building their Postgres competitor.
When I questioned Lambert about this contradiction on Twitter, he virtually shrugged and wrote: "the other service has them daily."
Funding and Acquisitions
Better Auth, the open-source authentication framework, raised a $5 million seed round led by Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia Capital India & SEA). The company is betting on a "own your auth" philosophy that offers an alternative to the SaaS-first approach of Auth0 and WorkOS.
Better Auth's strategy involves building both the framework and the infrastructure to support it. They're planning a unified dashboard, enterprise security features, and globally distributed session storage. This hybrid approach of open source framework with paid infrastructure mirrors what companies like Supabase and PlanetScale have done successfully.
More Developer Tool News
Timescale, the time-series database company, became TigerData in a rebrand that signals their expansion beyond time-series into real-time analytics and AI workloads. The company is positioning itself as "the Modern PostgreSQL for the Analytical and Agentic Era", targeting the growing market of AI applications that need fast data processing.
✨ Vercel, the front-end development platform, held Ship 2025 in New York City, and announced The AI Cloud, "a platform for both developers and agents". This includes an AI Gateway, Active CPU, Vercel Sandbox, and a bunch more stuff.
✨ Knock, the notification platform, received 13 badges from G2, "including High Performer, Momentum Leader, Fastest Implementation, Best Support, and more". Congrats to the team, and my former colleagues! This G2 recognition caps off the final project I worked on for Knock, when I focused on improving enterprise sales with more extensive customer proof.