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Comment by neilellis | Hacker News Reader

I like the idea of integrated payments and login - I use Auth0 and ChargeBee at the moment. I hope you know what you are getting yourself in to :-) these are two highly complex areas.

The best chance of succeeding in this I would guess is to get funding and scale quickly. I've seen people attack this area before and they basically run out of money and the project hangs. You need to project a lot of confidence and stability while moving fast - so adequate funding will be key.

Good luck, if you nail this hundreds of SaaS startups will be very grateful.

PS: pricing is way too generous, think in terms of revenue.

So a SaaS with 1000 users is getting something like $20K gross a month, with 10K users that's $200K gross.

I'd change your levels to something like

100, 500, 1000, 5000, Contact Us

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We think that those two areas can be connected and it will very valuable for SaaS startups. We were thinking about the generosity for our pricing plan, we are considering increasing the prices for the premium and enterprise plans. Thanks a lot for the feedback!

May I ask what you use Auth0 for? I agree it's easy to do authentication wrong, but it's not that hard that I'd want to outsource it all myself.

Auth0 doesn't just provide authentication, it's OpenID Connect provider which is really where it becomes an attractive option.

Hey Lucas

I'm very happy to share!

So I'm on my 6th or 7th startup attempt at the moment. User management is one of those areas which starts off simple but becomes an amazing distraction. If you're a team of less than 5 people you're sacrificing a huge amount of time on something which isn't core business. When I first started I did everything myself, but after each startup I learnt more and more not to do anything myself.

So in my current project I'm using (amongst others) these startups to replace things I would initially have done myself.

ChargeBee - Billing

Auth0 - Authentication

AWS Lambda - Server logic

Firebase - persistence for the UI

Zapier (the swiss army knife for SaaS companies!)

Surge.sh - static SPAs

Intercom - everything to do with users which isn't auth.

The initial fear of lack of control when using 3rd parties that sometimes SaaS companies have is unwarranted, the odds are against us succeeding in the first place so time spent writing auth stuff etc is time we'll never get back. Even if we succeed we will probably take 2 years to be profitable. That's plenty of time to migrate our systems if we need to - and we probably won't.

ATB, Neil

Makes sense, thanks for the explanation!

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