Hi Zsolt, thanks for the write-up. I found your 1.5-year article after seeing some users recommend logto.io in the comments. I’m part of the team at Logto, focusing on pricing design, and your insights really resonated with me.
On the topic of pricing, I agree with your observations. It’s a challenge we’re working hard to solve. Many auth providers have pricing models that aren’t very developer-friendly, even with various SKUs. Developer tools are unique—they don’t offer the same instant appeal as AI or productivity apps. Developers need time to assess features, pricing, security, and control before making decisions, which often discourages auth providers from investing in developer-first approaches: Can I get money from them？
Most developers face a tough choice between open-source solutions or expensive professional CIAM platforms. We want to addressing this issue and close this kind of gap, and here’s where we currently stand:
Logto Free plan offers basic authentication features and supports up to 50k MAU.
For paid service, projects can start at just $16, with add-ons available: unlimited organizations for $48, MFA with all factors for $48, and enterprise SSO for $48 each.
For solo B2C developers, this brings costs to about $16–$100, if your project is a simple B2B project on the early stage, it's still less than $300, which we’ve found works well for building and sustaining projects.
Looking ahead, we’re exploring a token-based pricing model. MAU isn’t the best measure of resource usage because it doesn’t account for engagement levels. For example, a user who signs in daily and a user who signs in twice a month both count as one MAU, even though they consume different amounts of resources from the auth provider. While MAU is useful for business metrics, it doesn’t accurately reflect technical resource consumption.
Until we finalize this idea, we’ll keep unlimited MAU for our Pro plan.
Our core principle remains the same in the long run: we want to keep billing controllable and within a reasonable range, aligned with the developers' product’s stage and revenue outcomes, and avoid unexpected or excessive charges.
By the way, Logto offers both an OSS version and a cloud version!
I've been on a similar journey for the past couple of weeks. to find an auth provider I feel comfortable using. My needs are simpler than yours (no need for SAML or enterprise features) and I was also ready to settle with Zitadel - until I took a look at the underlying PostgreSQL database. I just can't make sense of its structure and where/how data is stored and organised, which means that if I want or need to take my data elsewhere (which was my top requirement), I'm stuck.
Also, their documentation seems to be lacking and/or not very clear in a few areas.
All in all, the software sounds great and seems to be really solid once you get over the initial struggle with its complexity, but it seems too complex for what I want, and more importantly, I don't feel I would own my data since I would not know how to access or manipulate it from outside the software.
What about keycloak?
Hi Zsolt, thanks for the write-up. I found your 1.5-year article after seeing some users recommend logto.io in the comments. I’m part of the team at Logto, focusing on pricing design, and your insights really resonated with me.
On the topic of pricing, I agree with your observations. It’s a challenge we’re working hard to solve. Many auth providers have pricing models that aren’t very developer-friendly, even with various SKUs. Developer tools are unique—they don’t offer the same instant appeal as AI or productivity apps. Developers need time to assess features, pricing, security, and control before making decisions, which often discourages auth providers from investing in developer-first approaches: Can I get money from them？
Most developers face a tough choice between open-source solutions or expensive professional CIAM platforms. We want to addressing this issue and close this kind of gap, and here’s where we currently stand:
Logto Free plan offers basic authentication features and supports up to 50k MAU.
For paid service, projects can start at just $16, with add-ons available: unlimited organizations for $48, MFA with all factors for $48, and enterprise SSO for $48 each.
For solo B2C developers, this brings costs to about $16–$100, if your project is a simple B2B project on the early stage, it's still less than $300, which we’ve found works well for building and sustaining projects.
Looking ahead, we’re exploring a token-based pricing model. MAU isn’t the best measure of resource usage because it doesn’t account for engagement levels. For example, a user who signs in daily and a user who signs in twice a month both count as one MAU, even though they consume different amounts of resources from the auth provider. While MAU is useful for business metrics, it doesn’t accurately reflect technical resource consumption.
Until we finalize this idea, we’ll keep unlimited MAU for our Pro plan.
Our core principle remains the same in the long run: we want to keep billing controllable and within a reasonable range, aligned with the developers' product’s stage and revenue outcomes, and avoid unexpected or excessive charges.
By the way, Logto offers both an OSS version and a cloud version!
I've been on a similar journey for the past couple of weeks. to find an auth provider I feel comfortable using. My needs are simpler than yours (no need for SAML or enterprise features) and I was also ready to settle with Zitadel - until I took a look at the underlying PostgreSQL database. I just can't make sense of its structure and where/how data is stored and organised, which means that if I want or need to take my data elsewhere (which was my top requirement), I'm stuck.
Also, their documentation seems to be lacking and/or not very clear in a few areas.
All in all, the software sounds great and seems to be really solid once you get over the initial struggle with its complexity, but it seems too complex for what I want, and more importantly, I don't feel I would own my data since I would not know how to access or manipulate it from outside the software.