Minor point, but the author says about Clerk that they’d glady pay 1% of revenue for a polished auth solution.
That might be true for a side project, but that would be an absurd figure for an established company. Can you imagine a company with $100M revenue paying Clerk $1M a year? I’d find that deeply concerning.
While I'd agree that $1M is a lot, it's not altogether that crazy. (Full candor: we are ourselves a managed auth company, so I naturally have a vested interest in people wanting to pay for auth)
We could start by drawing an analogy to another vendor: Stripe. Our company pays much more than 1% of gross sales to Stripe for handling our payments. I wince a little every time I see our revenue leaking out to them, but I also don't have a great alternative. It's basically fine, and it's just the cost of doing business.
Relatedly, if you're a $100M business, what alternatives do you have to Clerk (or equivalent vendors)? One option would be to run auth in-house. If you do that, you pretty quickly hit $1M in headcount costs alone by staffing ~3 engineers + ~1 product manager to build and maintain an auth service. (Bear in mind that the fully-loaded cost of a hire vastly exceeds base salary). I don't think many CFOs are going to lose sleep over the cost/benefit here.
And in practice, that's exactly where a lot of companies land. Lots of companies pay Auth0 seven figures annually. It's expensive, but it's still a pretty good deal for some companies.
That might be true for a side project, but that would be an absurd figure for an established company. Can you imagine a company with $100M revenue paying Clerk $1M a year? I’d find that deeply concerning.