Identity is worth buying before you build it

Technology

Auth0 sells the parts of authentication that are tedious to build and expensive to get wrong: password storage and reset, MFA enrollment, social and enterprise connections, SAML and OIDC federation, session revocation, and an audit log somebody in procurement will eventually ask to see.

We reach for a hosted identity provider when the requirement list has a customer's Okta or Entra tenant in it, or SCIM provisioning, or a retention policy on login events. When an application only needs its own accounts, a library in the codebase is usually cheaper and stays that way.

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Identity

What a hosted identity provider is actually worth

  1. Federation is the line item worth paying for

    The enterprise deal asks for single sign on against the customer's own Okta or Entra tenant, then SCIM provisioning, then an export of login events. Each of those is a protocol implementation plus a per tenant onboarding flow you maintain forever. Buying it costs less than staffing it.

  2. Pricing tracks monthly active users

    Auth0 bills on monthly active users, and the features enterprise buyers ask about sit on the higher plans: a login page on your own domain, organizations, longer log retention. Growth arrives as a larger invoice. Price the plan you need in two years, not the one that covers launch.

  3. Keep authorization in your own code

    User records and password hashes export cleanly, so accounts stay portable. Actions, connection settings and the login flow do not, and those get rewritten if you leave. Let Auth0 answer one question, who is this person, and keep what they may do inside your application.

Auth0 sits in the platform list we publish, and it has not yet appeared in a Monogram case study. The authentication work we have shipped and written up runs through NextAuth.js in the application, or through OAuth 2.0 against an API directly.

If login is the thing blocking an enterprise deal, that is a two week build plan. Start a conversation.