[ivan_gammel]

SSO is not contributing to the core product USP and is pure money extraction mechanism. If company can add enough value on enterprise plan, they could easily drop SSO on less expensive tier. If company cannot add enough value to the core product, they use SSO and reachable customer support to justify more expensive subscription. This may deincentivize customers to buy more or reduce overall security if customer fails to implement processes for standalone login and manual provisioning of accounts.

[Spivak]

> and is pure money extraction mechanism

Yes, you act like this is a bad thing. You hold back and charge for the features customers want enough to pay for. You’ve never noticed that whenever there’s a Free/Pro of an app the one feature you need is always on the Pro version?

> add enough value on enterprise plan, they could easily drop SSO

That really isn’t how it works. You find some small set of features that enterprises must have like SSO, auditing, and compliance and charge them out the ass for it. This is where the real money for every B2B SaaS comes from and subsidizes the low cost tiers which they hope will translate to an enterprise sale when you ask for it at work.

[eurasiantiger]

The problem is that often the pro features are very nearly essential, like having more than one door in a car.

[nrb]

It makes more sense to them to add that other value to the non-enterprise plans or licensing to attract more users, then charge the businesses that MUST have the SSO or audit functionality, because they know enterprise will pay it without blinking an eye.

[ivan_gammel]

It is a common misconception that SSO is useful only on enterprise scale and that companies where SSO and provisioning is crucial for security have huge IT budgets. Any scale-up still on the way to profitability needs it at few hundreds of employees and it’s really hard to justify 100k budget for it. Couple junior admins for provisioning and accepted and misunderstood risk of credentials explosion look more attractive than tripling the bills for every subscription. Who suffers? Customer who is exposed to cybersecurity risks.

[nrb]

I’m not at all discounting the value of SSO to all users, totally agreed. Just that in the business of software this just plainly makes the most sense for most companies. It’s useful for everyone, but it’s required for enterprise (via security policy or other mandate), hence why the screws are put to them.

I’m a bit curious why we don’t see more price segmentation happening with the SSO feature set included, presumably most of these SaaS are seat-limited by plan anyway. If I had to guess, they just don’t want to deal with the headache of tons of small SSO implementations clogging up their support resources.