🔒 The Hidden Costs of ‘DIY’ Identity in Indian Startups

Why building your own login/auth system could hurt more than help

As Indian startups grow faster than ever, many founders take pride in building everything in-house — from products to infrastructure. But there’s one thing that almost always gets built the wrong way: identity and access management (IAM).

At first, rolling out your own login system feels simple:

• ✅ Create a user table
• ✅ Add a password field
• ✅ Drop in a login form

Done? Not quite. The real cost shows up later — in security risks, lost enterprise deals, compliance gaps, and developer time wasted on maintaining the basics.

1. 🔐 Security Isn’t a Side Project

Most DIY identity setups don’t include:

• Proper password hashing (like bcrypt or Argon2)
• Rate limiting and brute-force protection
• Session handling and refresh token logic
• Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)

When these are missing, you're open to serious breaches. And in India, attacks on mid-sized startups are rising — especially on weak login systems.

2. 🧑‍💻 Developer Time Drain

Your engineers didn’t join to reinvent login flows or build custom role-permission logic. Yet, this is where many early teams burn weeks of effort.

Maintaining homegrown IAM systems means:

• Debugging auth issues
• Writing migration logic for user models
• Hardcoding access rules into business logic

This is time not spent building product features.

3. 📋 Compliance Becomes a Nightmare

From India’s DPDP Act to global standards like SOC 2 and GDPR, secure access is a compliance must-have.

DIY systems often don’t support:

• Audit logs
• Role-based access
• Account recovery and session visibility
• Tenant isolation

Fixing these later is not only time-consuming — it can cost you deals.

4. 🤝 Losing Enterprise Clients

Enterprise buyers expect support for:

• SAML / OIDC SSO
• SCIM-based provisioning
• Custom RBAC
• Fine-grained policy control

If your IAM stack can’t offer that, you’re out of the deal — simple as that.

We’ve seen Indian startups lose large opportunities just because they couldn’t support SSO login with enterprise IdPs.

5. 🚪 Access Management Goes Out of Control

Without a proper IAM platform:

• Ex-employees retain admin access
• Contractors share credentials
• Teams don’t know who has access to what

This is a ticking time bomb — and it only gets worse as you grow.