🔗 An unpopular perspective on the SSO tax
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Given our company's role enabling SAML SSO, I often hear about the SSO Tax. It's usually pretty negative; people feel strongly about this stuff.

The SSO Tax

For those of you less familiar with the SSO Tax, you may find an overview of single sign-on (SSO) helpful. More briefly, single sign-on (SSO) enables companies to control employees' access to software by centralizing authentication behind a single service that we call an identity provider (IDP).

To make single sign-on work, companies need their software applications to communicate with their IDPs. Many software applications choose not to include this single sign-on capability in their basic pricing tiers, instead reserving it for more expensive, more fully-featured pricing tiers.

Airtable's pricing serves as a good example. If you want SAML SSO, you need to buy their Business tier at $45/user/month. To be clear, Airtable isn't unusual in this respect; they're just one of many companies doing this. If you wish, you may find a longer list of companies here on a "wall of shame."

The nearly ubiquitous convention of reserving SAML SSO for higher pricing tiers has earned from disgruntled buyers a derisive nickname, which I used above: The SSO Tax. If you want SAML SSO, you have to pay. Sometimes you have to pay a lot. People don't really like that.

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