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Comment by protoduction | Hacker News Reader

The base idea is the same yes, but the pricing and featureset are different.

Magic.link is venture funded with steep pricing per user. This makes sense for their enterprise target market, but for a hobby project I can't remotely afford it. They keep a record for you of your users, in my product that's your own responsibility (which imo is a good thing).

tldr: What I'm building is simpler, and much more affordable, but not enterprise-feature complete.

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What would your pricing be? Starter pack at $35/month for 500 users sounds like $35/month and I outsource auth to a company that is also on the hook for “enterprise” security :)

I think it’s awesome you’re building an alternative with a different feature set, I’m really curious to hear your take on pricing.

The pricing is listed on the website, but it's about 10-20% of that. You would pay around 0.50 per 1000 emails. Depending on how often your users sign in and how long you keep them logged in for the the percentage may be lower or higher.

Not offering SAML/SSO/OIDC etc simplifies the problem a lot allowing me to offer it cheaply. The largest cost is sending the e-mails reliably, for which I am wrapping Amazon SES.

I’m not very vested in a solution at the moment, but if I had a set of users < 500, the flat pricing of Magic Link kind of makes more sense to me, I don’t want to be worrying about how many times they sign in.

That being said, I can imagine there are people who would prefer a per sign in model, it’s just a level of granularity I don’t care for.

Good luck!

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