Migrating away from a social login provider

Question

If I were to fully integrate Janrain Social Login or Oneall what would the hurdles be to migrate away into my own custom system?

For example many developers use Janrains social plugin (and the many others) because they don't have time to do all the code for providing their own solution or because it's quick and convenient.

However, somewhere in the future, perhaps when the developer has more time, he may write his own solution using, let's say, the OpenID selector and an openid library (such as stackoverflow own solution). Furthermore, Janrain and Oneall becomes expensive, it's good to get your first few thousand users but after you have a sudden increase in user registrations, it becomes incredibly expensive (especially if you're only using social login and not the other social features)

The problem I see is, in my facebook app, the site URL (oneall for example) I give to the FB app is 'http://myapp.api.oneall.com/' which will handle all the validation and link the account and then redirect to my websites callback url.

However, if I replace Oneall with my own solution (the site URL will change), what would happen? The authentication would then become invalid, no? and the user will have to accept permissions again? How would I do a successful migration?

I hope I've explained that well enough. Maybe this is trivial, but some clarification would be greatly appreciated. I want to make sure I'm not tied in to Oneall or Janrain.

Answer 1

I don't have much experience with Oneall, but Janrain makes the Engage service as seamless and non-intrusive as possible. In other words, you get to keep your user data no matter what happens. That's why Janrain provides the API endpoints and you are free to call and keep that profile data in whatever fashion you desire. Janrain Engage does not store any user data on the servers, and they don't withhold access if you are planning to leave.

For example, if you have a Wordpress site and use our Engage widget plugin to gain traditional as well as socially logged in user data, you keep those Wordpress users even if you remove the Engage widget. Their login experience does not change after the fact either.

Of course, when the developer has time and resources to build a home-grown site, they have to program the way user profiles are managed server-side anyway.