The SSO tax: what enterprise sign-in costs, per vendor, in published prices

There is a moment in every B2B company’s life when a large customer’s security review arrives and asks for SAML single sign-on. It is a reasonable request: SSO is how an enterprise revokes access when someone leaves, and it is the control their auditor asks about.

It is also, at several authentication vendors, a separately metered product. This is what it costs, quoted from each vendor’s own pricing page and last verified on 30 July 2026, and what it means for the deal you are trying to close.

The published rates

What that does to a real rollout

The number that matters is not the unit price, it is the multiple. Enterprise SSO is per customer, because each customer federates to their own identity provider. So the cost scales with exactly the segment you were hoping to grow.

Ten enterprise customers at $125 per connection is $1,250 per month — $15,000 a year — before a single one of their employees signs in, and independently of how much you charge them. At fifty customers on the same list price it is $6,250 a month. Volume tiers soften the curve, but the shape does not change: your infrastructure bill grows one step every time you win the kind of customer you most want.

The argument for charging, and where it stops holding

The honest case for per-connection pricing is that enterprise SSO carries real marginal cost: every customer’s identity provider is configured differently, certificates expire on their schedule, and SAML deployments produce support tickets that a password login never does. Someone pays for that, and metering it is not indefensible.

The case weakens on two points. First, the marginal cost is largely support, which does not scale linearly with connection count — the tenth SAML integration is not as hard as the first. Second, and more seriously, it prices a security control as a premium feature. The customer asking for SSO is asking to be able to switch off a departing employee’s access centrally. Charging a surcharge for that is charging for the ability to offboard people safely.

The same argument applies more sharply where multi-factor authentication is metered. One vendor on this list prices MFA as a paid add-on at $0.01 per monthly active user with a $100 per month minimum — so a small product pays a hundred dollars a month for the privilege of not relying on passwords alone.

Questions worth asking before you sign

1. Is SSO per connection, per customer, or unlimited? “Included” sometimes means one connection, which is enough for exactly one enterprise customer.
2. Does SCIM directory sync count as a separate connection? At more than one vendor it does, doubling the per-customer cost for the customers most likely to demand it.
3. Are MFA and passkeys on your plan, or above it? A security baseline that only exists on the tier you have not bought is not your security baseline.
4. What is the price at ten times your current volume? Published tiers usually stop before the number you will actually reach, and “contact sales” above that point is a repricing event you cannot forecast.
5. What does it cost to leave? If the export omits password hashes, migration means asking every user to reset their password — which in practice means not migrating. That is a switching cost, and it belongs in the comparison.

Where we stand

Adetio does not charge per organisation or per enterprise connection, and passkeys and multi-factor authentication are on every tier including the free one. That is a deliberate position rather than a promotion: we think metering the controls that let a customer revoke access, and metering the second factor, prices the wrong thing.

Our own figures are confirmed at launch and we are not publishing numbers we might have to revise — the pricing page says exactly that, and it will keep saying it until the numbers are final. Comparing an unpublished price against published ones would be the cheapest trick in this article’s subject matter, and we are not going to do it.