We gave away every feature on the free tier, including the ones rivals reserve for enterprise

Our free plan costs nothing, caps out at 250 monthly active users, and ships single sign-on, SAML, SCIM provisioning, multi-factor authentication, role-based access control, audit logs, and your own branding on your own domain. That feature list is deliberate. It is roughly the same list our competitors file under "Enterprise," or hide behind a "Contact sales" button, or bill per connection at a hundred-plus dollars a month.

The usual assumption is that this is a loss leader. A bait. Give away the good stuff, get your auth wired into someone's product, then squeeze once they are stuck. It is not that. Giving away every feature is the honest position, and it holds up against a spreadsheet. Here is the math, because the math is the entire argument.

Start with what a feature actually costs to provide. We made this case in the feature tax: SSO, MFA, SCIM and the rest are code written once that now runs for everyone on the platform. The bytes are the same bytes whether someone signs in with a password or a corporate identity provider. When a free tenant switches SAML on, our costs do not move. There is no per-feature meter spinning in a datacenter. The marginal cost of one more tenant using one more feature rounds to zero.

So if features are free to hand out, what is not? Two things, and only two.

Active users cost money. More monthly active users means more sessions, more tokens signed, more storage, more egress. That tracks real resource use, and we can measure it. Which is why the free tier has a hard number on it: 250 MAU. Not 250-features-minus-the-expensive-ones. 250 people. Cross that line and you move to a paid plan, because at that point you genuinely cost something to serve.

Support costs money. A human answering a gnarly integration question at 2am is a real, recurring expense. So is the AI that powers our multilingual support desk, which bills us for every message it translates. The free tier is community-only: docs, forums, a thread on GitHub. No support desk, no AI assist. That is the other thing we hold back, because it is the other thing with a bill attached.

Notice the shape of that. We gave away everything with a fixed cost and metered the two things with a variable cost. That is the whole model. The wall was never features. The wall is active users and support. A hobby project, an internal tool, a small business with 200 users can run production single sign-on, SCIM deprovisioning, MFA and a real audit trail, for free, indefinitely, and it costs us almost nothing to let them.

Now look at where the rest of the industry puts its wall. In front of the features. SSO lives three tiers up. MFA is an upgrade. Audit-log retention is sliced by plan. That gate is not recovering a cost, because there is no cost to recover. It is there because your security and compliance features are the ones you can least afford to refuse, which makes them the ones with the most leverage to charge for. A tollbooth on a road that was already built and paid for.

We would rather not run that experiment on the people using us. The ugly part of feature-gating is that it charges hardest for the responsible thing. You need SSO because your biggest prospect's procurement team insists. You need MFA because your own auditor does. Fencing those behind "Enterprise" is a tax on doing security properly, collected at the precise moment you have the least room to say no. Putting them on the free tier is that same principle from the feature tax followed all the way down: if it costs us nothing to provide, you should not pay for the privilege of turning it on.

The one real consequence is that a free tenant makes us no money, and that is fine. We make money the boring way, when people grow. A team that starts at 40 users on the free plan with full SSO is a team that, at 4,000 users, pays for scale. Not for switches they were always allowed to flip. By then they have had audit logs and SCIM running in production for a year, which is a far better reason to stay than a feature we finally deign to enable for a fee.

So yes: every feature, on the free tier, including the ones our competitors reserve for enterprise. Not out of generosity. Because features were never the thing that cost money, and pretending they were is exactly the tax we exist to undercut.

If you want to see where the line actually sits, here is the pricing. The free tier is the one up top that says $0 and still ships SAML.