WIP
Why you must not use Auth0/Okta for login/pass solution, and why we plan to leave this provider.
I would like to share here my story about OAuth. How while developing my company, their pricing strategy became almost a scam.
Here comes the pricing from their website:
So everything was good until we “switched” #they-forced-us to the enterprise plan. As you could imagine enterprise plan is about saving costs at scale because we become serious customers.
Not at all, my billing per login/pass jumped from x to 8x. There is nothing useful for us in this enterprise plan except a longer token lifetime #a-more-than-a-simple-option.
So here is what my billing month after month looks like:
You could say, wouahou you are so lucky, your customer base increased like crazy between March 2022 and April 2022. But not at all, here is my MAU dynamic:
So if we analyze all of this, other the years we increased our MAU from a base 100 to 167 so easy to say we have a 1.67x on our user base.
On the other side, we switched from 240$/month to +9,700€ per quarter and even 13.8k our last Q4–22 bill: 3.8k€ for the quarter so a 3.45k€ per month.
No, you don’t dream a 14.37x per month, so at the end of the day:
By switching to an enterprise plan we have a 8.6x cost per user for the same usage.
- Maybe there are some features we don’t care at all about that justify such a high price, but if so: it is a trap, a scam to practice such insane price growth.
- Maybe we are bad negotiators and accept like dumb people such an increase.
At the end of the day, if you do freemium, NEVER use this solution (we have some trial and pay for these connections without any revenue).
If you are in the 100’s ARR range, forget, this solution can cost you up to a few % of your margin for a simple login/pass solution.
When you are locked they don’t care.
What I can say now is that they don’t care about our situation, I work with a lot of tech companies. I already face some price increases, it is the game, I accept that, but I never add 8.6x on cost, never.
