Recently we at my company (Doable) decided to embrace Social Login/0Auth/SSO for our next product. Let users sign in how they want! Let the conversion rates rise due to not needing to register! Easy right? No — not really. In fact it is a huge PITA to set up and integrate if you are doing an SPA with a separate backend and want to allow multiple forms of login and need to validate every request (JWTs, Bearer Tokens, Insert other buzz strategy here! -.-). It became so irritating I almost threw in the towel .

Then came Auth0. Within 20 minutes I was up and running with a proof of concept SPA app that was successfully talking to our API backend. Hoorah! And it was free. Or not, otherwise this post would be very misleading.

Auth0 has an awesome free plan up to 7,000 users. However realistically most people will be jumping to the development plan pretty quick for a myriad of reasons I won’t discuss here. Cue due diligence, including price research both over one year and three. Using their nifty sliding scale you can easily see the pricing as you jump tiers. Something odd happened though around the 10,000 user mark though.

At the 5,000 user ceiling you are paying only $60/month. At 10,000? Well as you can see on the left it jumps to a whopping $200 a month. So whats $200 for simple logins? Not much — just a 333% increase in cost for a 100% increase in user count.

Three hundred and thirty three percent. For a one hundred percent increase in user count. Take a moment and understand that folks. That’s more than three times the cost of the prior plan. For the same features just more users. What. The. Fuck?