https://sso.tax/ a lot of companies put SSO behind a paywall. Not a fan of making users pay for basic security features.
If you’re at the point where employees x services is too big to do manually and then congrats you graduated to the “actually paying for the service tier.”
There’s no real way to skin, “the only real money is by charging many dollars to large enterprises and if we can’t easily price discriminate the thing we’re dropping is the subsidized free/startup tier.
But I understand the need to milk the badly managed companies.
There are plenty of other features that can be worth paying more for. Just look at GitHub Enterprise. The fact that the only way there is to get SSO is to pay 4.5x more is insane. But, as a GH Enterprise customer myself, there are plenty of other features (separate environments, more Action minutes, advanced code scanning options, etc.) that make GH Enterprise worth it.
The features of GH enterprise you listed are nice-to-haves, above a certain org size SSO is required.
I think we are disagreeing, because the point is that small orgs absolutely should not have to compromise on this basic security feature, and the end result is a less secure internet that is a detriment to everyone.
I do think hiding SSO behind "call us" is a pain however.
I do wonder how much of that money goes into subsidising the free tiers and paying (comparatively) enormous wages of developers to add features I don't really want.
I've seen probably ~10 companies financials that do this. It's ALL OVER THE PLACE. The reality is that the free doesn't two things: tests those new features on guinea pigs and lets you upsell to someone who has given you permission to do so.
There's no free lunch.
Fair. But wouldn't the opposite also hold true? The purchasers who say "what..I got pay $10/user/month extra for JUST SSO?"
> To integrate one is less than 100 lines of code.
Ugh not this again...
Let's use a simple example:
AcmeCo makes a widget and sells it for $50
WorldCo buys widget for $50 and uses it create $75 worth of services, thereby profiting $25.
AcmeCo has an opportunity to make up to charge up to $74.99 if they want, because WorldCo still profits. That, in its simplest terms, is what pricing on. value means.
Europe, Asia, or otherwise don't magically say "well that's not fair, you don't deserve higher profits". That's silly, so stop pretending thats the case outside of the US.
If we accept that service providers are going to price discriminate, then we accept that they are going to price discriminate on _some_ imperfect heuristic.
It seems to me that you have to argue
(A) Businesses should not price discriminate
Or
(B) price discrimination based on marginal features is okay but this particular feature (needing SSO) isn't very predictive
Or
(C) This particular feature might be predictive, but security is too important to be part of a willingness-to-pay heuristic, so it's unethical to use this particular feature in this way.
C seems like the argument a lot of people here are obliquely making.
At minimum I think it's reasonable to charge for SSO onboarding and maintenance on as as-needed basis.
The best happy medium I’ve found is allowing “sign in with google” for free and true SAML paid.
Use-based pricing is my favorite pricing method, but your product has to be useful if you want to charge based on use. Most people don't have the guts to do it, because the "per user per month" is such an easy way to get money. If you go for use-based pricing, you have to make sure people actually use your thing, which is hard work!