Unrelated to SSO, I’m involved in audits that regularly seek changes which don’t improve safety or security but which often help the bottom line of big providers.
If you want a product to succeed without natural growth, get an an auditor to require it.
It’s selling your soul and those being audited will hate you, but it’s very lucrative.
I find it funny that people say things like this, because not only is it demonstrably not true looking at different product segments, but even if it was you're basically admitting to self-selecting as a customer who would never have paid in the first place and so companies are overjoyed that you're not using them.
"I would have paid you if you gave me X for free" is the biggest lie.
It is more nuanced like that. If you do not have any other value proposition for paid tiers, you might keep telling yourself that, it is your sales model after all.
Okay, look. There's two universes here. Universe A is where split up the features of our product into tiers based on "value" -- some arbitrary groups based on how useful we think each feature is, how expensive they are, how long they took to develop, estimated person-hours saved, whatever. Sweet, it feels right. Now the free/low cost tiers are genuinely less useful than the higher tiers. Pay more for more. SSO probably still lives at the mid or enterprise tier for no other reason that it's a PITA, is the cause of like 20% of support requests, and our SSO vendor charges us per month per SSO connection.
Universe B is where the free/low cost tiers have every feature except for specifically the features and increased usage limits that get SMBs and Enterprise to pay us.
Both on the sales side and the user side I want to live in Universe B.
There is no magic universe where "just increase your value proposition to Enterprise customers" -- it's the same product just carved up differently and non-enterprise customers lose in Universe A.
Imagine you go to a supermarket and see the same brand carry two tiers of eggs: "Eggs" and "Salmonella-free Eggs".
Even if you could easily afford the salmonella-free eggs, the mere fact that they are willing to sell salmonella eggs at all says a lot about how many shits they give about food safety.
SSO isn't a premium or differentiator feature, it's table stakes.
> SSO isn't a premium or differentiator feature, it's table stakes.
Not for B2C, hobby projects, very small businesses. That's why it's great as a differentiator: because it separates the wheat from the chaff. And is often non-trivial as the number of integrations grows. Hence the SSO middleware market.
