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Comment by closewith | Hacker News Reader

Locking SSO behind the Enterprise option works. Your company is an outlier that can be ignored.

Companies of that size are common. It would in isolation even be profitable to serve them. The problem is if you introduce a middle tier that includes SSO, many enterprises will go for that instead of the expensive enterprise tier you want them to buy. Basically, you sacrifice medium companies as customers in order to chase after that sweet enterprise money.

That makes sense, but I still think there are other features that can be gated behind enterprise to help make sure that doesn't happen while still providing SSO for smaller companies.

You can have user limits on the non-enterprise plans (Microsoft does this, for example, with Business Premium locked at 300 users or less), or gate other features behind enterprise: Have MFA across the board, but lock conditional access behind enterprise, lock more advanced audit logs & reporting behind enterprise, lock RBAC behind enterprise, or data residency, custom security policies, API limits, etc.

There are numerous other features that are non-negotiable for enterprises to help funnel them into the enterprise plan, while still being able to service medium companies with SSO.

Companies of that size are served by the "enterprise call a salesperson" offering. If you really don't need all of the other features you can probably negotiate a discount.

I'd hardly call a business with between 150-300 employees, that cares about SSO but doesn't need the full suite of enterprise features an outlier, I'd imagine that's fairly common nowadays.

Maybe in 2015 it was an outlier, but SSO is now a non-negotiable and with many of these businesses on M365 business premium, which includes EntraID P2, SSO is now accessible to a large number of companies where it wasn't before. It's no longer some niche enterprise only functionality, it's a bare minimum for business SaaS.

The fact you’re unwilling to even consider a product with SSO behind the enterprise license is what makes you an outlier, and frankly probably a bad customer.

And if you’re trying to negotiate custom, non standard licensing when you’ve only got 300 employees you will likely be a noisy customer in perpetuity.

No offense, that’s just how I’m betting 99% of folks read your response.

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