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I understand the business logic of why we have the SSO tax. I simply think it’s greedy and misguided in the modern era.

I was speaking primarily from a business perspective, in particular one where I make technical decisions for mine and other (client) businesses.

Experience has taught me that SMBs benefit greatly from SSO. They’re also simply the least likely to have the talent around to implement it well and reliably. So while you can use the SSO tax to drive revenue, you’re just moving the burden of account management to individual users and admins of small teams. As a long-time provider to small teams I can tell you how much they really hate dealing with that overhead when they probably already have a SAML and/or OIDC IdP service included with their MS365 or Google Workspace tenant.

So as a result, I select away from those offerings if there are comparable alternatives, and there almost always are.

I am not advocating for the use of social IdP (“Sign in with [Apple|Microsoft|Google|etc]”) for anything. I really dislike those as well, to the point that I actively select against services that only support signing in with a third party that I can’t control. I was specifically talking about SSO as it’s traditionally interpreted: SAML, OIDC, LDAP, etc that you control.