@some-bear-63847 I see after looking into everything you just told me I have a better understanding on how I can use ory for my workflow! I was worried that my current system would not be able to be replaced by ory because there is special information I need stored about the user when they sign up! One thing I do have a question for though if anyone could answer is how hooks work with self hosted ory kratos? I was looking for the configs on where this would be, but since its ory kratos from the github repo, I am not sure where the config files for setting up hooks would be. Not to mention the docs on hooks are kind of confusing for me to understand. Though I assume hooks is what I want to use right?

Hello @fast-alarm-79278 If you are just starting out I recommend trying out Ory Network. You can play around with the API, (almost) all features, and use the console UI - then you can export the configuration and use it for a self-hosted Ory Kratos/etc. See here for the full configuration of Ory Kratos incl. config for hooks etc: https://www.ory.sh/docs/kratos/reference/configuration

I see, I had no idea you could use Ory Network for free. I only saw the price tag and was like nope, gotta self host it aha.

You cant use it for free in production, but there are free developer accounts for testing and development.