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| | Ask HN: Why isn't there a backlash around charging for security features? | |
57 points by eranation on Jan 11, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 65 comments
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| | There is a very common (dark?) pattern I see employed by practically everyone in the industry, instead of charging for differentiating features, we seem to accept that it's ok to charge for security features as premium features in the pretense that these are "Enterprise Features". I am not here to name and shame but you know how it works. Role Based Access Control, SSO integration, API access to audit logs, MFA are presented as "premium enterprise features", why isn't there a bigger backlash? Why is this practice not pushed back by everyone? The startup I'm building, we are committing to provide SSO/SAML/OIDC, audit logs, advanced RBAC etc for free for everyone, we want people to pay for actual differentiating features. Am I missing something here? |
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"Needs SSO integration" is one of the cleanest market seg signals available to a SAAS startup. Customers that really want SSO integration are overwhelmingly large enough to stop obsessing about SAAS seat costs. What's better, this extremely desirable cohort of customer prospects is increasingly mandated, as a cohort, to seek SSO integration.
A frequent cynical (and, justified) question asked about new services appearing on Hacker News is "where do they make their money?". You know, "if you're not the customer, you're the product"? Well: this is one very straightforward way companies manage to have generous free or cheap tiers.
We're not going to charge extra for SSO integration; we're SAAS customers ourselves, and the sso.tax is, obviously, super annoying. And you can take this idea way too far --- as you would be if you charged extra for 2FA. But "dark pattern" doesn't mean "everything we find super annoying in business". I absolutely understand why SAAS companies tax SSO.