December 27th, 2023

The Clerk team has been hard at work shipping new features to help you build secure applications faster. Here’s a rundown of some of the highlights:

Custom Roles & Permissions is in Public Beta

More control to operate your B2B SaaS via Custom Roles and Permissions.

Powerful Authorization Options: Model your application's roles and permissions to fit your use case. Easily assign custom roles and access levels across your application.
Customizing Your Application: Use our new has(), protect(), and <Protect> helpers to conveniently implement custom authorization logic directly in your application code.

To learn more, read through our announcement blog post, or dive right into the Custom Roles & Permission docs →

Introducing a new pricing structure and a better way to see your usage.

Simplified Pricing Structure: A new Pro Plan with additional features, Pro Add-Ons to fit your application's use case, and 10,000 MAUs free on all plans. In addition, new users will now receive their “First Day Free”.
Updated Billing Dashboard: We overhauled the Plan & Billing section of the Clerk Dashboard so you can more easily understand your current plan’s usage.

Fight back against bots and protect your users from brute-force attacks with Account Lockout.

Enhanced Security for Your Users: Protects against brute-force login attacks by temporarily locking user accounts after a configurable number of failed sign-in attempts. This prevents bots from endlessly attempting to gain unauthorized access.
Easy Activation, No Code Required: Account Lockout is automatically enabled for all Clerk applications with smart defaults. Tweak the settings or disable at any time in the dashboard under User & Authentication > Attack Protection.

Improved UX for SAML Authentication: Enforce the usage of your IdP, even when customers initiate using SSO.
Fetch Users by Latest Activity: Updated Backend API endpoints allow you to filter users by latest activity.
Dashboard Development Mode: Updated Dashboard UI to make it easier to see when you’re in a development instance. This helps to better indicate that actions taken, such as copying and rotating keys, or modifying other settings, will not apply to the production environment.
Optimized API Performance: Improved caching and latency for a handful of our Backend API endpoints.
Improved Analytics Calculations: Optimized performance of WAU and MAU analytics calculations to allow for longer, 6+ month lookback periods for larger datasets.

If you have feedback or suggestions, we want to hear them – let us know at feedback.clerk.com. For the latest on our product releases, follow @ClerkDev on X or join the growing Clerk Community on Discord.

Wishing you a happy holidays!