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Comment by claystraw | Hacker News Reader

Thank you Sytten, this comment makes me happy because it confirms our bias! MAU pricing has always been my personal enemy. Ory is and never will charge on a MAU basis. Instead, we'll be working with CPU, Memory, and Disk usage (like any other cloud provider) and with additional services on top. We're not fully there yet to communicate this clearly, but if you're interested check out the pricing page to understand where we want to land at: https://ory.dev/pricing/

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MAU pricing is terrible! love this idea.

Heads up, I don't quite get this from your pricing page at all right now.. It says "First 900 free" and "First 100 free" without any indication of what those numbers mean.

Clerk (your profile says you're CTO) has a per-user pricing though? Or are you planning on changing it?

> It says "First 900 free" and "First 100 free" without any indication of what those numbers mean.

Thank you, we'll clarify that! It means that we're giving the first 900 "start up" and 100 "growth" plans away for free for a year

Ahh, that makes sense, cool!

Yes, I am the CTO @ Clerk, and we do have per-user pricing right now, however, that doesn't mean we like it. It's something we've struggled with - how do you make pricing scale in some way, while still being clear, while also being predictable. There's also value in being in-line with the status quo - when your numbers are priced competitively using the "industry standard (auth0)" scale.

Every method, I think, has it's issues, and it's something we would like to make as frictionless as possible in the decision making process. I imagine with a "per CPU/mem usage model", you will run into a lot of questions.. (how am i supposed to know how much CPU/mem you, as a cloud provider, uses?). I also don't necessarily think gcloud/aws/etc. are the bastion of clear pricing.

Per API call seems more predictable, but still not as clear as the "at a glance, MAU number" Do product managers know how many API calls your average user would use? Yes, auth is most often implemented by devs, but are they always the buyer?

I do think there's something better, and I like thinking about new options :) We don't have a clear plan to change from MAU right now, but I hope we get there. Love ory btw, been following it for quite some time!

> Per API call seems more predictable, but still not as clear as the "at a glance, MAU number" Do product managers know how many API calls your average user would use? Yes, auth is most often implemented by devs, but are they always the buyer?

I’ve done some research into Hydra: https://gruchalski.com/posts/2021-05-23-do-you-really-need-a....

I suggested that because the pricing page said 900 free users and that got me worried. Glad to see you are moving in the right direction!

I think you might want to try the API calls pricing model (a la S3) because as a dev I usually don't know how much resources I need. But I can estimate that if I have X user that login each day that makes Y API calls which translate to Z$ (with proper spamming protection of course).

I think the pricing page suggests that if you sign up now, you won’t be paying the $21/month fee (for one year).

It’s hard to use the correct terms when you have users signing up to user management as a service xD

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