The economics of Authentik adoption for self-hosted SSO

The escalating cost of proprietary identity

Auth0 links its pricing to monthly active users (MAUs) and premium feature tiers. While a free tier supports 7,500 MAUs, companies experience rapid cost escalations as they grow. Many B2B operators report 3x or 4x price hikes during renewal periods. For a 100-user company, Okta Essentials combined with identity governance costs $20,400 annually. This figure ignores the "SSO tax" where SaaS vendors charge 15% to over 100% more per user to connect a third-party provider. A company using 80 tools with 40 requiring SSO upgrades at $5,000 per tool faces an additional $200,000 in annual subscription costs because of these vendor premiums. For organizations managing large user bases, the cumulative cost of per-user pricing and mandatory add-ons for features like MFA or API access can lead to a massive budget deficit. Okta Workforce Identity prices vary from $6 for Starter to $17 for Essentials. Adding Adaptive MFA adds $6 per user per month, while Lifecycle Management costs $4 per user per month. Auth0 also separates its Customer Identity (CIAM) platform from its workforce tools, meaning teams pay separate fees for employee and customer authentication. This dual-stack approach forces organizations to manage separate configurations, dashboards, and compliance reports. For B2B users, Auth0 B2C Essentials starts at $35 for 500 MAUs, while B2B Essentials starts at $150 and requires a custom quote for B2B Professional access. This separation occurs because Auth0 remains a dual-product entity following the Okta acquisition.

authentik provides predictable scaling

authentik eliminates per-user pricing surprises by providing a free open-source version with no limits on users or automations. Organizations running enterprise self-hosted deployments pay $5 per internal user per month and $0.02 per external user per month. This model provides a massive advantage for companies looking to scale to large, unpredictable user bases without incurring additional fees. The core remains MIT-licensed, though enterprise directory features use the authentik EE License. Enterprise Plus provides FIPS compliance checks, custom contracting, and volume discounting.

Self-hosting on AWS for an installation managing 80 concurrent logins costs approximately $480 per month. It includes two c7g.2xlarge instances at $260, an RDS database at $200, and networking at $20. This cost remains fixed regardless of whether the system serves 100 or 100,000 users. A smaller production setup using DanubeData’s DD Small at €12.49 per month plus managed Postgres at €19.99 and Redis at €4.99 brings the total to €37.47 per month. You should consider if your internal engineering capacity can manage these specific infrastructure components.

Technical trade-offs in deployment

authentik provides the best path for teams requiring easy management of internal applications. Its visual authentication flow builder and built-in proxy outpost allow teams to protect apps that lack native SSO support. This Python-based system requires a server, a worker, and a PostgreSQL database. This setup remains lighter to operate than Keycloak, which requires JVM tuning and handles session caching through Infinispan. Keycloak provides deeper protocol support including standard token exchange, DPoP, and FAPI 2 Final. Keycloak also includes built-in B2B multi-tenancy through its Organizations feature. Authentik has around 22,000 GitHub stars, while Keycloak maintains approximately 36,000 stars. Authentik wins for fast deployment using its visual editor and YAML blueprints. While Keycloak provides Red Hat support, the authentik ecosystem remains smaller. The authentik proxy outpost runs as a lightweight Go binary, which simplifies deployment compared to the complex components required for Keycloak. Does the lack of built-in multi-tenancy in the free version of authentik hinder its adoption for B2B SaaS builders?