3 ms·

The reality is much simpler than the article would have you believe. The article goes through all these convoluted explanations about value add but the simple f

The reality is much simpler than the article would have you believe. The article goes through all these convoluted explanations about value add but the simple fact of the matter is that SSO is the one differentiator that businesses will guarantee pay for. The other features are often unknown to stakeholders outside of the internal champion and need explanation oftentimes. But SSO, enterprises always need at a certain scale. So it’s incredibly effective because it’s the one feature that every single enterprise that wants to purchase your product cannot do without. In fact, the exact opposite conclusion of the article is reached if we follow this logic. One of the taglines reads: Buyers want different things. Well, maybe the stakeholder/champion actually using your software might. But often they are not the ones that are making the money decision in an organization. The people who ARE making that decision, however, do not want different things. They probably could care less about different things. They want SSO.

karlgkk 2y ago
I think the friction here is from midsized companies. Where onboarding software that’s purchased is much harder than free software. I think it might be worth saying “SSO is free, up to n users”. Also this is pricing for “adequate security”, which rubs a lot of people the wrong way. But I do agree, competent, organizational wide SSO with SCIM is definitely an enterprise feature.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 2y ago
  As I pointed out in a sibling thread, most SaaS offer “SSO at home” eg oauth2/oidc via either Google idp or GitHub in lower tiers, often in free tiers. So to get “adequate security” you don’t necessarily have to pay the SSO tax, but your alternative is that you must be locked to one of those two vendors, which is of course not ideal at all. But to say you have to pay the SSO tax to get “adequate security” is not really true at face value because of this. That being said, obviously this situation as described sucks and we should not move towards it because really all it does is push SaaS startups towards these two vendors to punt huge licensing fees down the road until they have the revenue to support it. And by then they are significantly locked in to these specific two vendors, two vendors that already have problematic approaches to monopolizing certain things. So fixing this is important but for a different reason than one might take at face value.
commandar 2y ago
I'm in the healthcare world. SSO is a hard requirement for us. There have been many, many times where we've considered an application where we could justify the spend at, e.g., the departmental level for the limited user base that needed it, but where SSO being bundled into higher price tiers combined with minimum user counts took a potential solution from "very easy discretionary spend" to "not happening, full stop." I'm often the one having to make these decisions. It's absolutely exhausting having to explain to non-technical department heads that "yes, this would solve your problem at a price that fits budget, but the vendor bundles a vital security feature into a tier that inflates the price to a point that it makes this unfeasible."
- SOLAR_FIELDS 2y ago
  Curious: Are SaaS sales unrepentant on pricing in these cases? I would think with a bit of spice on your side in procurement you could probably negotiate enterprise for a small premium over the middle tier. Knowing enough software sales people when given the choice between “Teams + $5/user/head” and “no sale at all” suddenly options open up. But maybe the people I know don’t support too much SSO stuff…
  - commandar 2y ago
    Mixed bag, IME. Some vendors will work with you, some stick to their guns. Either way, it's a surefire way for a potential vendor to automatically get lower priority from me as a potential buyer. Needing to haggle over what is, for us, a baseline security feature starts things off on the wrong foot.

karlgkk 2y ago

I think the friction here is from midsized companies. Where onboarding software that’s purchased is much harder than free software. I think it might be worth saying “SSO is free, up to n users”. Also this is pricing for “adequate security”, which rubs a lot of people the wrong way. But I do agree, competent, organizational wide SSO with SCIM is definitely an enterprise feature.

SOLAR_FIELDS 2y ago
As I pointed out in a sibling thread, most SaaS offer “SSO at home” eg oauth2/oidc via either Google idp or GitHub in lower tiers, often in free tiers. So to get “adequate security” you don’t necessarily have to pay the SSO tax, but your alternative is that you must be locked to one of those two vendors, which is of course not ideal at all. But to say you have to pay the SSO tax to get “adequate security” is not really true at face value because of this. That being said, obviously this situation as described sucks and we should not move towards it because really all it does is push SaaS startups towards these two vendors to punt huge licensing fees down the road until they have the revenue to support it. And by then they are significantly locked in to these specific two vendors, two vendors that already have problematic approaches to monopolizing certain things. So fixing this is important but for a different reason than one might take at face value.

commandar 2y ago

I'm in the healthcare world. SSO is a hard requirement for us. There have been many, many times where we've considered an application where we could justify the spend at, e.g., the departmental level for the limited user base that needed it, but where SSO being bundled into higher price tiers combined with minimum user counts took a potential solution from "very easy discretionary spend" to "not happening, full stop." I'm often the one having to make these decisions. It's absolutely exhausting having to explain to non-technical department heads that "yes, this would solve your problem at a price that fits budget, but the vendor bundles a vital security feature into a tier that inflates the price to a point that it makes this unfeasible."

SOLAR_FIELDS 2y ago
Curious: Are SaaS sales unrepentant on pricing in these cases? I would think with a bit of spice on your side in procurement you could probably negotiate enterprise for a small premium over the middle tier. Knowing enough software sales people when given the choice between “Teams + $5/user/head” and “no sale at all” suddenly options open up. But maybe the people I know don’t support too much SSO stuff…
- commandar 2y ago
  Mixed bag, IME. Some vendors will work with you, some stick to their guns. Either way, it's a surefire way for a potential vendor to automatically get lower priority from me as a potential buyer. Needing to haggle over what is, for us, a baseline security feature starts things off on the wrong foot.