[DGCA]

I've noticed that a lot of paid dev tools are just priced too high or that I run the risk of blowing my budget depending on scale. I wish more paid dev tools were aware that I don't actually know my usage up-front, and that I'm scared of potentially ending up with a ridiculous bill if I overlook something.

I totally get that it's on me, but things [like this](https://hackernoon.com/how-we-spent-30k-usd-in-firebase-in-l...) happen, and I'm way more apprehensive of services that make that a possibility. E.g. I'd love to use Auth0 for everything, but the risk of spending way too much on something I can roll myself is always on my mind.

[shantly]

Bingo. Risk is what keeps me off anything without a cap on billing. If I spend $25/mo on Digital Ocean, that number's not gonna change unless I tell it to. My site may go down, but I won't accidentally run up a five-figure bill on a just-getting-started side project that's not guaranteed to ever generate revenue.

That and having to keep up with a bunch of different bills.

[jon-wood]

This is something I'm hitting up against a lot at work currently. Our application is high volume, with a significant proportion of users who don't bring in any recurring revenue, which makes us very cautious about picking up new SaaS services which are billed on a per-user basis.

We went through the same process around Auth0, and eventually built our own solution for handling authentication because even with our current user volume all Auth0 would tell us on pricing was "contact sales", which tends to be the case with every product we look at these days.

[enlyth]

Auth0 quoted us 25 - 50k a year for 7K MAU, we found this insanely high as we don't handle any sensitive data.

It seems we might use Amazon Cognito, which seems a bit rough / neglected when it comes to aws products but the difference is basically free up to 50K MAU.

Couldn't find a nice middle ground, Okta and the others were all prohibitively expensive as well.

[shantly]

If you don't mind sharing, what was it from Auth0's "call us" column for pricing that bumped you up to that tier? Middle one is still high, but under $25k, let alone $50k, for 7k MAU.

[camhart]

Auth0 has done some dirty pricing changes as well. They dropped pricing for a while then raised it a ton. Basically pinching everyone who started using their service.

[james_impliu]

Mixpanel was really frustrating in this regard