Pricing opacity: the SSO tax and the MAU trap.

MAU pricing punishes the exact shape of business CIAM exists for. A retailer with 40 million registered users but 5 percent monthly activity still pays for the spike months, and the model rewards nobody for the dormant base it is storing. The trap is that the number on the pricing page is computed against a usage pattern that consumer identity rarely has.

Feature gating compounds it. The capabilities security will insist on, SSO, advanced MFA, and audit logs, are frequently pushed into enterprise tiers. This is the SSO tax: the login box is cheap, the security requirements are not, and the two are priced in different places. Buyers routinely report three-to-five-x gaps between the initial quote and the final contract once professional services are included.

The defense is to price the real configuration, not the demo. List the security requirements first, then get a quote with them enabled, and model billing against your actual activity rate and spike profile rather than the vendor's example. The capabilities mapped below are the ones most often discovered to be tier-gated. See the pricing models guide and model your own bands in the TCO calculator.