This sort of business doesn’t have to immediately realize a profit they just have to expand their base of customer and dig their claws deeper into their customers core infrastructure. Once they do that they can exploit their customers for years before they’l be able to escape. Since they are frequently going to be competing in “lowest bidder wins” competitions they’re be foolhardy to try and make a profit up front honestly, counter-intuitively it would be lighting money on fire. This is also a product with pretty substantial benefits from scale, as Okta gets bigger more things integrate with them so they’re easy to integrate with so they get bigger…

I’m just wondering who in the industry is still stupid enough to stick their neck out for Okta? Why are they getting new customers? Why not go with the other devil you know your cloud provider to offer mostly the same services? What is Okta offering when they seem relatively incompetent compared to the competition that often offers their products for cheaper up front?