Apartment Therapy Scales Authentication with Stytch

Apartment Therapy is one of the most recognizable names in digital publishing for home and lifestyle content. Alongside its sister sites, The Kitchn and Cubby, it reaches millions of readers each month with design inspiration, recipes, and family-friendly tips. But beyond beautiful photography and useful editorial, Apartment Therapy has been quietly building a suite of user-facing features: saving recipes, building vision boards, and personalizing experiences based on logged-in accounts.

The shift from being “just” a publisher to providing interactive, account-driven tools, put new demands on their authentication infrastructure.

The Previous Setup: Auth0 and a Tangle of Workarounds

Like many companies, Apartment Therapy started with Auth0. It got them off the ground quickly, but as the sites grew, cracks appeared:

• Complexity and technical debt: Years of layering new functionality left their user model cluttered. Migrating or extending flows required touching brittle code and awkward workarounds.
• Friction in user onboarding: Users had to pick between multiple login methods, verify emails upfront, and jump through hoops before they could engage with content. That meant high drop-off at the very moment Apartment Therapy wanted people to engage.
• Limited flexibility: Auth0 offered core authentication but made it hard to blend in new approaches—like Google One Tap—or to simplify the login flow around Apartment Therapy’s editorial UX.
• Operational blind spots: Getting logs into their own data warehouse required stitching together custom solutions. Support teams had few tools to help users without pulling in engineering.

The team knew they needed an authentication partner that wasn’t just a plug-and-play box but something flexible enough to grow with their ambitions.

The Turning Point: Why They Looked for Something New

By 2022, the product and engineering leadership had three main goals:

1. Cut registration friction to boost logged-in users. Their target was to grow from ~3% of traffic logged in to 15%, a huge jump that required rethinking every step of the onboarding flow.
2. Adopt modern, low-friction login methods. Google One Tap was a clear winner across the industry, but implementing and maintaining it reliably in Auth0 was messy.
3. Own their data and their roadmap. Apartment Therapy needed richer logs, easier user management, and the ability to plug authentication into experiments like embeddable Magic links and future paywall concepts.

That combination led them to Stytch.

Why Stytch: Developer Experience First

Stytch appealed to the engineering team for reasons both practical and cultural:

• Ergonomic APIs and SDKs: During integration, the team found Stytch’s REST API and libraries straightforward, well documented, and clean. A contrast to the brittle, patchworked code they’d been maintaining before with Auth0.
• Flexible migration paths: Using opaque session tokens allowed Apartment Therapy to run Stytch alongside Auth0 during migration, avoiding a risky “big bang” cutover.
• Future-proof by design: Instead of reworking brittle auth logic, for each new feature, Stytch’s modular API’s and session model let Apartment Therapy add methods like Google One Tap or Magic Links without rewriting their foundation.

The Implementation: From Friction to Flow

Apartment Therapy’s new authentication stack with Stytch rolled out in phases, but the highlights included:

• Google One Tap everywhere: One Tap was embedded across all properties, making login or sign-up possible from any page with a single click.
• Multiple options without clutter: In addition to One Tap, users could still log in with Magic links or traditional email/password, but those flows were streamlined. Display names and email verification were no longer required at account creation, removing speed bumps that had caused drop-off.
• Backend validation for seamless migration: They used Stytch’s session management to support both Auth0 and Stytch users during migration, simplifying the process and maintaining consistent authentication flows.
• Custom email templates per site: Each brand (Apartment Therapy, The Kitchn, Cubby) got its own tailored templates for login, signup, and password reset, powered by Stytch’s email system.
• Logging and analytics: Auth events were streamed into BigQuery via Pub/Sub, letting the data team build richer reports around authentication events and retention.

On the support side, PMs could now self-serve user lookups and updates in Stytch’s dashboard, reducing dependence on engineering for small fixes.

The Results: 10x Growth in Registrations

The numbers tell the story:

• Roughly 96% of users now choose OAuth/Google One Tap when it’s available.
• Password-based logins dropped to ~1%, with Magic links covering the remaining sliver, exactly the kind of simplification the team wanted.
• Support tickets related to login fell dramatically, freeing up engineering to focus on new features instead of troubleshooting auth.

Looking Forward: Beyond Login

Today, authentication at Apartment Therapy isn’t just a gate, it’s a growth lever. With Stytch in place, the team is exploring:

• Embeddable Magic links in marketing emails, so readers coming back from newsletters are already logged in and ready to save, comment, or build collections.
• Device fingerprinting for both fraud prevention and retargeting. This could help them protect new LLM-powered chatbots (e.g., a Home Depot partnership for product recommendations) while also improving audience targeting in a cookieless world.
• Passkeys and future login methods as adoption grows, keeping friction low while tightening security.
• Potential paywall or premium features, where device-level protections and flexible login flows will be critical to preventing abuse.

Quote insert : “Stytch is just out there working. We don’t have to think about it—and that’s exactly what you want from an auth system. At the same time, it gives us new levers to pull as we try to hit ambitious goals like growing logged-in users fivefold.” – Andrew

Takeaways for Backend Engineers

For backend-focused teams, the Apartment Therapy story underlines a few lessons:

• Secure migration approach: Their authentication setup ensured a safe transition between systems while allowing instant revocation for stronger security.
• Simplicity wins. Removing “just one more required field” in signup flows led to huge improvements in conversion.
• Developer ergonomics matter. When the underlying APIs are clean, engineers can spend their cycles solving business problems instead of fighting boilerplate.
• Authentication is part of growth. The right stack doesn’t just secure users—it enables new product directions, marketing experiments, and business models.

Conclusion

Apartment Therapy’s move from Auth0 to Stytch wasn’t just a vendor swap. It was a strategic replatforming that cut friction, boosted user registrations tenfold, and set them up for a future where authentication fuels engagement rather than stifling it.

For engineering teams facing similar crossroads, their story is a reminder: sometimes the most impactful change you can make isn’t adding a flashy new feature—it’s making the foundations invisible, reliable, and flexible enough to grow with you.