[ned_at_codomain]

While I'd agree that $1M is a lot, it's not altogether that crazy. (Full candor: we are ourselves a managed auth company, so I naturally have a vested interest in people wanting to pay for auth)

We could start by drawing an analogy to another vendor: Stripe. Our company pays much more than 1% of gross sales to Stripe for handling our payments. I wince a little every time I see our revenue leaking out to them, but I also don't have a great alternative. It's basically fine, and it's just the cost of doing business.

Relatedly, if you're a $100M business, what alternatives do you have to Clerk (or equivalent vendors)? One option would be to run auth in-house. If you do that, you pretty quickly hit $1M in headcount costs alone by staffing ~3 engineers + ~1 product manager to build and maintain an auth service. (Bear in mind that the fully-loaded cost of a hire vastly exceeds base salary). I don't think many CFOs are going to lose sleep over the cost/benefit here.

And in practice, that's exactly where a lot of companies land. Lots of companies pay Auth0 seven figures annually. It's expensive, but it's still a pretty good deal for some companies.