They aren't conflating anything. OIDC or SAML should not be "taxed" extra.
I do work for a number of small businesses and they can't afford the "enterprise cost" for things, so there is a shared password vault instead because there is no centralized management of users.
The small businesses all have some form of SSO available, whether they are using Azure Entra ID or Google Workspaces, they have a central location for users, but the cost is prohibitive for most products to get the upgrade to get access to SAML or OIDC for SSO.
But it costs extra. That cost is passed on to the consumer.
The major hurdle is that it's expensive!
Take a typical small business SaaS - providing SSO instead of standard passwords can take more time and effort to purchase or develop and to roll out than the actual SaaS software.
Okay, lets say you buy SSO: offloading to a service is going to cost a minimum of an extra $20/month/user.
Building it? That's going to take months of developer time, not to mention that this is a high-touch/high-feedback feature, which is going to eat up the service employees time.
And then the rollout, which almost always needs a month of external consultants getting everything working correctly.
I'm doing a small SaaS, $15/user/month; if anyone has any good recommendations that aren't going to to cost me a quarter of my current sale price, I'm all ears.
Even if it's DIY, as long as I don't burn a month of dev-time just for integration/deployment.
There likely is an off the shelf OIDC SP provider you can use for the actual "hard parts".
If you already use something like "Sign in with {Google,Facebook,Twitter,Apple}" you are already doing part of it.
I have built several products now with OIDC support for authentication (not authorization) and it has never taken more than a day or two to wire it up.
My advice would be to wait until a big enough customer is willing to pay through the nose for it. You’re “lucky” in that you charge per user so it’s easy to model into your pricing :)
To be clear, SMBs should be allowed to use Google Sign-in or Azure’s equivalent for the base pricing. I think this is table stakes for features (and security).
SAML? No chance. SMEs don’t need it and my comments above explain why vendors will never offer it.
Google Sign-In is locking people to using Google's infrastructure. If an SMB has already deployed using Azure you don't get access using SSO, instead you have to fall back to username/password?
Adding support for OIDC is not that difficult. I prefer OIDC over SAML anyway, but neither is that difficult.
> Adding support for OIDC is not that difficult. I prefer OIDC over SAML anyway, but neither is that difficult.
Since it seems that you know what you are doing (and you've done it before), how about a blog post detailing the steps one would go through when writing some SaaS app for a client who wants SSO?
The issue isn’t writing the code. It’s everything that comes after in terms of user support. The systems are relatively easy to integrate with libraries or products like Auth0.
In which case, I’d look at the documentation that companies put out for SSO to get a feel for the types of issues your customers will face. Make sure your system logs everything (or pay Auth0) and provide this as a feature. It’ll cut down a lot of support calls.
Budget in time for your engineers to sit on support calls and directly work through them with customers. Document every issue you see for your support team. If you can, hire a semi technical person to do this support (especially if you want to scale up). It’ll take a load off your engineers.
If your permission system allows it, enable IDP-initiated login as a must have.
Have a strategy for if a customer locks themselves out with a bad configuration. You’ll need either to force they have a password account or a way to reach out to Support to turn it off for them to try again.
After that, honestly, the issues will be a grab bag of things. They’re generally one-off issues per customer but they can take time while you resolve them.
Finally, most customers are great and get it. Some are great and don’t get it. The last group think they know more than you and clearly don’t. They’ll eat up most of your time.
If it requires configuration on the user’s end then it’s no better than SAML from the vendor's perspective. We’d much rather choose specific providers to hook into, based on the likelihood of increasing sign-ups.
I do work for a number of small businesses and they can't afford the "enterprise cost" for things, so there is a shared password vault instead because there is no centralized management of users.
The small businesses all have some form of SSO available, whether they are using Azure Entra ID or Google Workspaces, they have a central location for users, but the cost is prohibitive for most products to get the upgrade to get access to SAML or OIDC for SSO.