The SSO Tax: Why We Include SSO at No Extra Charge
Single sign-on reduces password-related security risk. Charging extra for it means companies that want better security have to pay more. We think that's backwards.
Many of our customers are surprised to learn that we can offer SSO included in our $20/month plan. For years, other SaaS companies have led buyers to believe that Single Sign-On is an incredibly expensive feature to serve, using this as justification to lock it behind enterprise tiers. We wrote this article to explain why that isn't true, and why we believe SSO should be accessible to everyone.
What the SSO Tax is
Many SaaS products restrict SAML or OIDC single sign-on to their most expensive tier. If you want your team to log in through your company's identity provider (Okta, Azure AD, Google Workspace), you need to upgrade. Often by thousands of dollars per year.
The sso.tax website tracks this practice. Here are some examples from their list:
| Company | Base price | Price with SSO | Increase |
|---|---|---|---|
| Appsmith | $15/mo | $2,500/mo | 16,567% |
| Railway | $20/mo | $2,000/mo | 9,900% |
| Mixpanel | $20/mo | $833/mo | 4,065% |
| GitHub | $4/user/mo | $21/user/mo | 425% |
Source: sso.tax. Prices as listed at time of writing and may change.
Why SSO matters for security
SSO is not a nice-to-have. It solves real security problems that every company with more than a handful of employees faces:
Centralized authentication
One identity provider controls access to all tools. No more separate passwords for each SaaS product your team uses.
MFA through your IdP
Enforce multi-factor authentication at the identity provider level. Every app that uses SSO inherits that protection automatically.
Instant deprovisioning
When someone leaves the company, disabling their IdP account revokes access everywhere. No need to track down and disable accounts in 30 different tools.
Less credential sprawl
Fewer passwords means fewer passwords to leak, reuse, or forget. Every additional credential is another potential breach point.
These are basic security hygiene. The kind of thing security teams recommend for every organization, regardless of size. Locking this behind a premium tier means smaller companies, the ones with fewer resources to handle a breach, are the least likely to have it.
What SSO actually costs to provide
The standard infrastructure cost for SAML federation through major cloud identity providers is around $0.015 per monthly active user. That's one and a half cents per user per month.
Simple Trust Portal includes SAML SSO in the $20/month plan. We do it comfortably. That should tell you everything you need to know about what SSO actually costs to run.
When a SaaS vendor charges thousands of dollars extra for SSO, that markup is almost entirely profit. The underlying cost of providing SAML authentication is negligible. The pricing exists because SSO is something enterprises need, and vendors know they'll pay whatever it takes to get it.
What about companies that "include" SSO?
Some vendors like Vanta and Drata technically include SSO in their plans. But their starting prices are already thousands of dollars per year. Including a feature that costs pennies to run in a plan that costs thousands is not generosity. If you are evaluating those platforms, look at what you are actually paying for and whether you need all of it.
Further reading: 1Password on the SSO Tax backlash · ConductorOne: What the SSO Tax is and why it matters
How Simple Trust Portal handles SSO
SAML 2.0 SSO is included for all paying customers. No enterprise tier. No per-user SSO fee.
Works with any SAML 2.0 identity provider including Okta, Azure AD, Google Workspace, and JumpCloud.
SSO enforcement available. Require all users on your domain to log in through your identity provider. No password fallback.
Included in the $20/month plan. The same plan that includes everything else. No tiers, no add-ons.
SSO included. No enterprise tier required.
Simple Trust Portal includes SAML SSO, document sharing with access controls, NDA gating, watermarking, and audit logs. All for $20/month.
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