Product analytics 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).
Product-analytics schema — tracked apps with unique ingest keys, an append-only event stream, session windows, and saved funnels, all hung off Better Auth's user table.
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
Product analytics schema: tracked apps, events, sessions & funnels
Tracked apps & ingest keysowner-scoped app registrations, each with a unique api_key used to authenticate inbound event writes
Events (append-only)the raw, immutable event stream keyed by app and timestamp, with freeform JSONB properties and an optional anonymous visitor id
Sessionsvisitor session windows (start/end timestamps) correlated to events via anonymous_id, with nullable ended_at for open sessions
Funnelssaved multi-step funnel definitions stored as JSONB steps arrays, scoped per tracked app
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.
api_key on tracked_apps carries a unique constraint: each app gets exactly one ingest key, and the key is the authentication surface for the event ingestion endpoint.
events is append-only (no update path, no status column) — the composite index on (app_id, occurred_at) is the only query handle; roll-up queries must scan that index, not mutate rows.