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Comment by distantsounds | Hacker News Reader

the "SSO tax" is literally the entire SSO product, a solution to a legitimate problem that businesses face and gladly shell out $$$ to not deal with. if your suggestion is to not pay said $$$ and instead roll your own solution, more power to you, but you're not "skipping" the SSO tax, you're simply passing it onto a different team to do the work of what SSO would provide you.

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To be fair - if the SSO tax was just a single SKU for adding _just_ SSO to the platform and it was a reasonable like $2 - $4 a user addition, most people wouldn't care. When we refer to the SSO tax what we normally mean is that SSO is gated into the "Enterprise" category of a tool for some reason, implying that only Enterprises use SSO. The difference usually also includes other tools that the customer doesn't need (we only want SSO) and so the price difference is usually huge. It makes SSO unrealistic for non-enterprise size customers.

IMO thats generally what people refer to when they say SSO tax. It isnt discounting that providing SSO requires work, its that its never decoupled from a huge platform upsell.

This reflects a trend of smaller and smaller companies using SSO, including startups that now use SSO right from the beginning because they know that certifications like SOC2 are on their roadmap and they want to get best practices in place early. In the past, it really was a 99% chance that customers wanting SSO were large companies, but that is changing.

That said, I'd say the trend is overrepresented in places like HN. It's still mostly bigger companies that want SSO, which is why SAAS cos keep using it as a pricing differentiator.

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