We wrote once about the feature tax: the trick of charging you to flip a boolean that's already written, on infrastructure that's already running. That piece was the argument. This one is the receipt.
Because "SSO costs extra" is easy to nod along to and easy to forget. A number on an invoice is harder to forget. So let's put the whole invoice on the table for three moments every B2B product passes through: the platform base (priced by monthly active users, which everyone charges and which is fair: more users genuinely cost more to serve), plus the two line items that actually meter SAML, the SSO connection and the SCIM provisioning that rides it. Three live columns, one all-in total. We include the base on purpose. The SSO tax isn't the only place money leaks; the gap in the platform price itself runs to thousands a year, and leaving it out would understate what the feature-tax model really costs you. All rates are each vendor's published June 2026 pricing.
SSO isn't even the only meter, just the loudest. There's a quieter one: the cap on OAuth clients, the apps and services you register on your own side. It never bites during evaluation; it bites mid-integration, the afternoon you go to wire up one more tool and find you're out, left to either reuse a client you shouldn't (your support desk minting tokens for your core API is not a sentence you want to read to a SOC 2 auditor) or jump a tier to add one row to a table. A client is a row and a secret; it costs the vendor nothing, so we don't meter it. But SSO is the headline tax, so that's what the tables below price.
