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Comment by sparrish | Hacker News Reader

This is the real reason there's an SSO tax. It costs to support SSO, the customers who want SSO should pay for that cost.

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I would agree that this cost-plus pricing structure applies in some cases. Some companies definitely want to constrain the universe of SSO users.

But this will usually show up in pricing structures with SSO as a relatively inexpensive add-on feature -- not as part of an indivisible bundle.

Seemingly we want to talk about both of these things as "the SSO tax" but I think we can agree that they're pretty different scenarios.

There are plenty of folks who setup SSO with open source projects without a support contract. Why should they have to pay for it with other software?

Because the engineers of the other software chose not to work for free?

I'm not saying they shouldn't be compensated, just that justifying the SSO tax due to the support burden is pearl clutching.

Do you mean that the support burden is not a valid reason to charge for SSO? In my experience support us the most tedious, annoying, and time-costly part of building a SaaS so I would definitely always charge extra for anything that requires more support

all functionalities are absolutely no warranty

I thought some company had free SSO for Google and 365 only and advanced SSO on the enterprise tier. I don't remember which company though, so maybe I made this up.

There’s a cost to support non sso authentication to.

non-sso authentication isn't nearly as support intensive. Sure there are support requests for 'regular' authentication but it's usually the "I can't remember my email" or "I can't remember my password" type stuff - easy replies.

SSO issues usually takes 10 or 20 times longer to sort out any issue.

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