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September 9, 2025

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

M2M Tokens Public Beta

Clerk's M2M tokens are now available in public beta, delivering secure authentication for backend service communication without the complexity typically associated with inter-service authentication. Consider a typical e-commerce application where your order processing service needs to communicate with your inventory service, payment processor, and notification service. Instead of managing API keys or building custom authentication flows, M2M tokens provide a standardized way for these services to authenticate with each other securely using just a few lines of code with Clerk's SDKs.

This eliminates the need to build custom authentication infrastructure or manage complex certificate chains while maintaining proper access controls and audit trails across your distributed architecture. The feature is currently free during the beta period, allowing developers to freely integrate and test with your own applications.

  • Multiple configuration options: Create machines directly from the Clerk Dashboard or programmatically via API, with immediate token generation capability
  • Flexible token customization: Support for custom claims, configurable expiration times, and instant revocation for fine-grained access control
  • JWT support planned: Future JWT token support will eliminate verification costs for high-throughput scenarios while maintaining creation-based pricing

Explore the M2M tokens guide in our changelog, or check out the example repository to see two Express apps communicating securely in under 10 lines of authentication code.

shadcn/ui Registry Support

Clerk components are now available through the shadcn/ui registry, bringing the familiar shadcn add workflow to authentication setup. This integration simplifies the process of adding Clerk to Next.js projects, allowing developers to bootstrap complete authentication flows with a single command. The registry includes everything from individual components like ClerkProvider to complete quickstart blocks with pre-configured layouts, sign-in/up pages, middleware, and theme integration.

The quickstart command npx shadcn@latest add https://clerk.com/r/nextjs-quickstart.json installs a fully functional authentication system including catch-all routes, route protection middleware, and automatic shadcn/ui theme integration. For developers who prefer granular control, individual components can be installed separately, maintaining the modular approach that makes shadcn/ui popular among React developers.

  • Automatic theme configuration: Automatic integration with your existing shadcn/ui theme system, including dark/light mode support
  • Complete quickstart block: Single command installs layout, authentication pages, middleware, and header components with proper routing
  • Modular installation: Install specific components individually using the same CLI workflow as other shadcn/ui components

Check out the shadcn/ui registry entry in our changelog or the reference in our docs and start building with authentication in minutes.

Free Trials in Clerk Billing

Clerk Billing now supports free trials with a configuration-first approach that eliminates the need for custom trial logic in your application code. Enable free trials for any subscription plan directly from the Clerk Dashboard with configurable trial durations, and the system automatically handles trial eligibility, card collection, and subscription transitions. This removes the complexity of building trial management infrastructure while following industry best practices like requiring payment methods upfront to reduce abuse and ensure smooth conversion to paid subscriptions.

  • Dashboard-driven configuration: Set trial duration and apply to plans without touching application code
  • Built-in abuse prevention: Automatic enforcement of one trial per customer with payment method requirements, eliminating the need for custom fraud detection logic

Learn more about this new feature on the changelog, check out our blog post for implementation details, or explore the billing documentation to configure your first trial-enabled subscription plan.

Enhanced Resilience with Automatic Regional Failover

Clerk has implemented automatic regional failover to bolster service reliability during major infrastructure disruptions, ensuring seamless authentication even when entire cloud regions experience outages. This system continuously monitors health across regions and automatically reroutes traffic without manual intervention, maintaining uninterrupted service for applications that depend on Clerk for authentication. The real-world effectiveness was proven on August 6th when Clerk's primary cloud region faced intermittent issues: health checks detected the failures and immediately redirected traffic to the failover region, keeping customer applications running smoothly.

The architecture goes beyond simple backup systems by maintaining an always-on failover region that continuously handles live production traffic. This approach ensures the failover infrastructure remains warm and ready for immediate switchover, eliminating cold-start delays that could impact authentication flows during critical moments. Data replication to dedicated storage in the failover region further minimizes latency during regional transitions.

  • Bidirectional failover capability: Traffic can switch between primary and failover regions in either direction, providing flexibility during complex outage scenarios
  • Always-on failover region: Continuous live traffic handling keeps failover infrastructure warm and immediately ready for switchover
  • Fast detection and automated switchover: Health checks trigger immediate traffic rerouting without requiring manual intervention or configuration changes

Explore the regional failover changelog for technical details, or read our resilience blog post to understand how this enhancement ensures uninterrupted authentication during regional outages.

Other features, fixes, and improvements

Resources

Author
Brian Morrison II

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