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Comment by chtitux | Hacker News Reader

With Pro accounts limited to 100 users, I believe this is a good opportunity to recall [0], that lists businesses that overprice SSO

[0] https://sso.tax/

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SSO as a requirement is a reliable way to differenciate small business/ hobbist from commercial usage of your product.

I really don't get at whom this SSO-tax hate is directed at?

SSO is becoming a necessity for small businesses also. If you are involved in audits, you will understand how valuable it is.

Unrelated to SSO, I’m involved in audits that regularly seek changes which don’t improve safety or security but which often help the bottom line of big providers.

If you want a product to succeed without natural growth, get an an auditor to require it.

It’s selling your soul and those being audited will hate you, but it’s very lucrative.

> you will understand how valuable it is.

Sounds like it’s worth the cost then.

No. If you gatekeep SSO, your product is not even considered. There are enough alternatives, so it is not a problem.

I find it funny that people say things like this, because not only is it demonstrably not true looking at different product segments, but even if it was you're basically admitting to self-selecting as a customer who would never have paid in the first place and so companies are overjoyed that you're not using them.

"I would have paid you if you gave me X for free" is the biggest lie.

It is more nuanced like that. If you do not have any other value proposition for paid tiers, you might keep telling yourself that, it is your sales model after all.

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Okay, look. There's two universes here. Universe A is where split up the features of our product into tiers based on "value" -- some arbitrary groups based on how useful we think each feature is, how expensive they are, how long they took to develop, estimated person-hours saved, whatever. Sweet, it feels right. Now the free/low cost tiers are genuinely less useful than the higher tiers. Pay more for more. SSO probably still lives at the mid or enterprise tier for no other reason that it's a PITA, is the cause of like 20% of support requests, and our SSO vendor charges us per month per SSO connection.

Universe B is where the free/low cost tiers have every feature except for specifically the features and increased usage limits that get SMBs and Enterprise to pay us.

Both on the sales side and the user side I want to live in Universe B.

There is no magic universe where "just increase your value proposition to Enterprise customers" -- it's the same product just carved up differently and non-enterprise customers lose in Universe A.

Imagine you go to a supermarket and see the same brand carry two tiers of eggs: "Eggs" and "Salmonella-free Eggs".

Even if you could easily afford the salmonella-free eggs, the mere fact that they are willing to sell salmonella eggs at all says a lot about how many shits they give about food safety.

SSO isn't a premium or differentiator feature, it's table stakes.

> SSO isn't a premium or differentiator feature, it's table stakes.

Not for B2C, hobby projects, very small businesses. That's why it's great as a differentiator: because it separates the wheat from the chaff. And is often non-trivial as the number of integrations grows. Hence the SSO middleware market.

> Not for B2C, hobby projects, very small businesses.

OpenID and OIDC would beg to differ.

This is less true in places where auditors don't understand sso.

SSO is not contributing to the core product USP and is pure money extraction mechanism. If company can add enough value on enterprise plan, they could easily drop SSO on less expensive tier. If company cannot add enough value to the core product, they use SSO and reachable customer support to justify more expensive subscription. This may deincentivize customers to buy more or reduce overall security if customer fails to implement processes for standalone login and manual provisioning of accounts.

> and is pure money extraction mechanism

Yes, you act like this is a bad thing. You hold back and charge for the features customers want enough to pay for. You’ve never noticed that whenever there’s a Free/Pro of an app the one feature you need is always on the Pro version?

> add enough value on enterprise plan, they could easily drop SSO

That really isn’t how it works. You find some small set of features that enterprises must have like SSO, auditing, and compliance and charge them out the ass for it. This is where the real money for every B2B SaaS comes from and subsidizes the low cost tiers which they hope will translate to an enterprise sale when you ask for it at work.

The problem is that often the pro features are very nearly essential, like having more than one door in a car.

It makes more sense to them to add that other value to the non-enterprise plans or licensing to attract more users, then charge the businesses that MUST have the SSO or audit functionality, because they know enterprise will pay it without blinking an eye.

It is a common misconception that SSO is useful only on enterprise scale and that companies where SSO and provisioning is crucial for security have huge IT budgets. Any scale-up still on the way to profitability needs it at few hundreds of employees and it’s really hard to justify 100k budget for it. Couple junior admins for provisioning and accepted and misunderstood risk of credentials explosion look more attractive than tripling the bills for every subscription. Who suffers? Customer who is exposed to cybersecurity risks.

I’m not at all discounting the value of SSO to all users, totally agreed. Just that in the business of software this just plainly makes the most sense for most companies. It’s useful for everyone, but it’s required for enterprise (via security policy or other mandate), hence why the screws are put to them.

I’m a bit curious why we don’t see more price segmentation happening with the SSO feature set included, presumably most of these SaaS are seat-limited by plan anyway. If I had to guess, they just don’t want to deal with the headache of tons of small SSO implementations clogging up their support resources.

The feature is implemented. I'd prefer to use it. It would cost them nothing to let me do so. Yet, I can't, because then big corporates wouldn't be milked for as much cash. I accept this as just another one of those inefficiencies of market capitalism, but it's still a little irksome.

> The feature is implemented. I'd prefer to use it. It would cost them nothing to let me do so.

The other way to view it is, by withholding a nonessential feature, Docker gets big customers to subsidize all the little guys, and their product is more accessible overall.

You can say that about any paid feature of literally any b2b software ever.

Discussed 5 months ago:

The SSO Wall of Shame

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31175300

(106 points, 41 comments)

The list misses adobe…

Reply on news.ycombinator.com