GoodRx, a leading digital healthcare platform that helps users find affordable prescription medicines, was struggling with an incumbent authentication provider that required code-heavy workarounds and time-consuming maintenance. Learn why GoodRx migrated users to Descope to modernize their CIAM stack, provide native mobile auth experiences, and save developer time.
About GoodRx
GoodRx is the leading platform for medication savings in the U.S., used annually by nearly 30 million consumers and over one million healthcare professionals. Its transparent price aggregation, discount coupons, subscription services, telehealth capabilities, and educational content helps users find the affordable medication they need at prices they can afford.
GoodRx interacts with a variety of stakeholders through multiple digital properties including:
The main GoodRx website and mobile app (iOS and Android)
An online prescription ordering tool to reduce user friction in the purchasing process
GoodRx for Healthcare Professionals, a unique web and mobile app experience for healthcare professionals to compare drugs and easily share discounts with patients
By uniting its user base, PBMs, retail pharmacies, healthcare professionals, and other relevant industry players towards the singular goal of affordability, GoodRx has saved Americans over $85 billion on medication costs since 2011.
Incumbent CIAM struggles
A key part of GoodRx’s mission is reducing friction and inefficiencies in the prescription discovery, comparison, and buying process. Unfortunately, their existing authentication provider had imposed limitations that prevented their team from advancing towards this mission:
Code-heavy workarounds: To deliver their desired user journeys and authentication methods, the GoodRx engineering team had no choice but to commit time and resources toward labor-intensive workarounds. For example, some forms of authentication were not natively supported and required custom HTML code—meaning the GoodRx team had to expend extra time and resources in any instance that changes were needed.
Subpar mobile authentication: The incumbent provider required browser redirects in certain user authentication experiences which led to increased user friction.
Passive support: GoodRx was disappointed with the passivity of the support they received and length of resolution times through its former CIAM provider.
Bharat Attaluri, Accomplished Software Engineer at GoodRx, said:
“GoodRx prides itself on being a fast-moving, experimentation-friendly company. While all other parts of our tech stack were built for this agility, modifying user authentication flows with the previous provider slowed everything else down.”
The Descope experience
Descope’s CIAM solution helped GoodRx adopt modern authentication methods, create frictionless user journeys across web and mobile apps, and confidently adapt to changing user needs–all while improving the developer experience and “descoping” mountains of auth code.
Workflow-based user journeys: Exchanging the complexity of code for the flexibility of no / low code workflows helped GoodRx achieve faster time to value with new auth initiatives. For example, they quickly supplemented OTP authentication options with Google and Apple social logins, and simultaneously introduced One Tap to a subset of web users.
Extensibility: GoodRx appreciated Descope’s connector ecosystem and utilized a range of third-party integrations directly in their user journeys. Their connector use cases included a Customer Data Platform (CDP) to track and sync user signals across go-to-market tools, email and SMS platforms to send one-time passcodes, and an audit connector to stream identity logs.
Native mobile auth: GoodRx used Descope’s native mobile auth SDKs to implement authentication flows that directly embedded signup, login, and information collection screens within their iOS and Android apps—meaning no jarring redirects for users. Native mobile flows provided the perfect balance, preserving the scalability and reliability of hosted authentication while delivering a polished, in-app experience.
CI / CD: While GoodRx really appreciated the concept of Descope Flows, they wanted to hold no / low code workflows to the same level of discipline as any software development process. The Descope Terraform Provider achieves this by enabling GoodRx to automate and manage development, testing, and production environments for authentication flows.
Stellar support: Descope’s developer relations and customer success teams were in lockstep with the GoodRx team throughout the use case discovery, deployment, and migration process. From thoroughly understanding the architectural implementation to jointly building out a bulk migration plan while avoiding orphaned identities, the deep collaboration between Descope and GoodRx played a key role in fast rollout without disrupting existing operations.
Bharat Attaluri, Accomplished Software Engineer at GoodRx, said:
“We learned pretty quickly that Descope’s workflow-based approach was the perfect fit for our goal of improving CIAM agility and improving developer experience. They essentially showed how to address all our challenges on one working call where we built a Descope Flow together.”
Seamless migration, no downtime
Healthcare is a high-stakes industry, with users often turning to GoodRx in stressful or urgent situations. Any login troubles, dropoffs, or downtime while migrating users from the incumbent CIAM provider to Descope had to be avoided at all costs. GoodRx’s migration plan combined a bulk migration approach with Descope’s session migration capabilities.
The bulk migration was achieved by using an export API provided by the incumbent CIAM provider, from which Descope was able to migrate tens of millions of users in around one hour. Descope’s session migration still allowed GoodRx users to continue their sessions during the migration without even realizing that anything had changed under the hood.
Letting CIAM…flow
With Descope, GoodRx found a CIAM solution that matched ease of use with enterprise-grade scale, allowing developers to deploy auth quickly and refocus on key product initiatives.
GoodRx has deployed Descope on its web and mobile applications as well as the retail pharmacy chain portal at the time of writing, with GoodRx for Healthcare Professionals and other portals planned for the near future.
Nitin Shingate, CTO of GoodRx, said:
“Migrating from a code-heavy CIAM implementation to a no / low code one has vastly improved developer experience. The flexibility of Descope’s platform enables us to offer unified, native login experiences across web and mobile interfaces and iterate confidently on our user journeys.”
Descope is a flexible, drag & drop external IAM platform that helps organizations easily add authentication, authorization, and identity management to their apps, AI agents, and MCP servers. Customers use us for initiatives such as passwordless authentication, SSO, identity federation, strong MFA, identity orchestration, fraud prevention, and agentic identity.
To get started with Descope, sign up for a Free Forever account. If you have questions about our platform, book time with our auth experts.
