AI Wrapper on Next.js 16 (App Router), Postgres (Neon) and Better Auth
Type-checked against the real SDKs, migration applied to a live Postgres (Neon), connection clients load-tested, then tracked for upstream drift and re-verified when it moves. How we verify
session validation runs in server components and route handlers, not at the edge
What you're getting
Next.js 16 App Router — file-based routing, server components, and the Edge proxy (Next 16's renamed middleware).
Postgres on Neon via Drizzle ORM and the postgres-js driver.
Better Auth — self-hosted auth running inside your app against your Postgres (Drizzle adapter).
AI-wrapper app — per-user profile extending Better Auth, per-call token metering, and append-only prompt/completion history.
Setup
bun add next react react-dom drizzle-orm postgres better-authDATABASE_URLNeon pooled (-pooler) connection stringBETTER_AUTH_SECRETgenerate with `openssl rand -base64 32`BETTER_AUTH_URLyour app's base URLApply the schema with bunx drizzle-kit push
Initialization
Database client
AI app schema: user profiles, token metering & prompt logs
User profiles extending Better Authone profile per Better Auth user, carrying default model preference and soft monthly token budget
Per-call token usage & cost meteringappend-only rows (one per upstream LLM call) that drive the per-user budget rollup and cost reporting
Prompt & completion log historyauditable record of every exchange — prompt, completion, token split, latency, and ok/error/filtered status
Deploy targets
Decisions and compatibility
Auth runs in proxy.ts (Next 16's renamed middleware) on the Edge runtime: it gates on the session cookie's presence only — full session validation happens in Server Components and route handlers, not in the proxy.
prepare: false is mandatory — Neon's pooled endpoint is PgBouncer in transaction mode, where server-side prepared statements break across the pool.
Drizzle is paired here (not Prisma): Prisma's prepared-statement reliance is incompatible with transaction-mode pooling.
Self-hosted: Better Auth owns the user/session/account/verification tables. This stack emits them (db/auth-schema.ts) and hands them to the Drizzle adapter, so app-type schemas can foreign-key `user` directly.
user_profiles.userId carries a UNIQUE constraint — it is the 1:1 extension of Better Auth's user row; the FK itself is the identity, so no separate join table is needed.
token_usage is append-only and stores cost as costMicrocents (bigint integer): no float money, fine-grained enough for sub-cent per-token pricing without a numeric type.