With that many users you don't pay the advertised prices. You schedule a call and they make sure you get an affordable offer.
> The average employee likely has 10-20 (hopefully) different sets of credentials that they must maintain and update as necessary
Time for azure, auth0, okta, or some other sso provider to just get rid of the passwords?
Even if they charged $0.50/per user, that would be $5k/month. I could go as a consultant and charge half of that to setup vaultwarden integrated with their AD for maybe 2 lazy days, and offer a support contract for $500/month. It's not even that much of rare skill. I'd guess you can randomly selected /r/selfhosted users and I'd give 10% of odds to find someone who has done it already and would even offer to do for less.
Yet, I think that most managers would simply prefer to go through all the negotiation meetings, all the internal procurement process just so they can justify the big boy expenses.
That's a very simplistic view of how it works in even a medium sized real company. Google SSO is already available for many external services you might use which is a lot easier to integrate than doing and maintaining something yourself. Especially because if there's an issue it's blocking everyone in the company at the same time. It makes sense to outsource that if it's not your core business.
You are arguing a strawman.
You're saying $500/mth, but my response would be: this is half a full time IT support position and it needs a secondary + on-call cover.
We are talking about $5k/month vs $500. If the UX of the FOSS version is lacking, pay for the closed version BUT throw $1000/month on the direction of the FOSS developers until the issues are mitigated and they satisfy your requirements. I can bet that in less than a year you'd be able to make a switch and the investment would pay itself.
This is not at all an easy thing to guarantee even if you’re willing to spend the money. The FOSS developers might not be interested in doing this work (even for pay) nor have UX staff.
So many talented people working for that money or less in São Paulo, Buenos Aires or Hanoi, it would be worth it to give it a shot even if they just worked part-time.
In all three cases, though, it sends a signal that there is demand for the changes. This works as both validation for the developers (our users wants this so much they are paying someone else to do it) and also for other companies (oh, why should we be paying this much to a closed-source service if we can pay a fraction of the price to get a reasonably-well-supported open source version?)
You go with companies that can demonstrate scalability because they provide project governance, proper change management, and layers of redundancy and support in the event of an emergency.
Also, the idea that someone charging $2k for two days of work is considered "doing it on the cheap" is almost offensive.
I know that people can come up with many perfectly reasonable justifications to spend this much on a service, but to someone like me who grew up in a poor country dealing with recession and austerity policies, it's hard to see these things and not thing "surely we can achieve the same results spending less?"