Their pricing is bat shit crazy. Stay far, far away.
I agree, our enterprise product is quite expensive. Let me explain why:
* We are going through several security audits by third party agencies several times per year. We are trying to hire the best security agencies to audit our code and it is quite expensive.
* We are recruiting globally and try to place our comp at 90th+ percentile of the compensation as listed in opencomp.com and other sources we have access to.
* Our sales process also takes time, and the sales team employs sales engineers, sales and customer success specialists to assist with deployments of such a critical piece of the infrastructure.
* For all our employees we have wellness benefits for home office improvement, personal development, healthcare packages.
All of these factors above add up and we charge a lot for building a quality security product supported 24/7 across the globe.
However, this might not work for everyone, and we have a completely free and open source version that people can use without ever talking to our sales team:
There’s room in the security market for $10/mo/user products and room for <whatever it is that Teleport charges>. If not, they’ll find out in an expensive and painful fashion…
Given that they have paying customers, their price is justified to at least those customers.
Teleport solves many quite important problems four our enterprise customers' infrastructure. Our users use Teleport to replace secrets and static keys with short lived certificates, manage certificate authorities, add audit and compliance controls for access to critical data, consolidate access for SSH, Kubernetes, Databases and Desktops.
Edit: per year. And there was a minimum order quantity.
You don't get support and some other things (see: https://goteleport.com/docs/enterprise/introduction/), but this is not a "demo" version where you cannot do actual work.
Kind of crazy indeed.
All competitors i can think of are also expensive.
* having an easy way to connect to all machines in environments where not everything is built the same way and on the same cloud or whatever. A big company can have a ton of teams building stuff across a variety of clouds and DCs. Not to mention those machines could be dynamic, so you need to add discovery. Heck, there might be Windows boxes here and there.
* having audit logs of who run what command on which server when
* extra security features like team management, MFA, etc.
You can do all that (minus audit logging) with SSH, sure, but it takes time and effort by the people who care least ( practitioners) about those things ( security teams). Buying something like Teleport or Wallix or Boundary solves all those problems at once.
here's one with numbers: https://smallstep.com/sso-ssh/pricing/#pricing
But in fairness there is a de facto number on this pricing page, and that’s zero. Their free open source plan.
So I give them a bit of credit for that.
It’s the companies that have no free tier or even an advertised monthly cost plan at all and just a “call us for pricing” that I find a real turn off (even in roles where I have been a potential “enterprise” customer). So I’d definitely draw a distinction between the two.