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Amazon tripled prices for the basic tier of their auth service Cognito

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Re: Amazon tripled prices for the basic tier of their auth service Cognito

#51

Post by bilalq »

I don't understand why AWS doesn't put more effort into Cognito without messing with pricing. It is such an effective loss-leader. If you're someone who will go past the free tiers for Cognito, the rest of your AWS spend will almost certainly be a lot more. Take advantage of that and stop measuring the Cognito team's success by their revenue and profitability. Usage alone should be the goal. You're still billed for all the lambda processing that happens on various Cognito hooks. You're still billed for all the API requests these Cognito users make.

The auth service space is so strange. Almost every vendor is ridiculously expensive for any B2C use-case. Cognito, with its free tier of 50k MAU, was one of the few relatively cheap options. Even the "open source core" offerings in the space are crazy if you use their hosted version. And their self-hosted versions inevitably end up requiring you to run Postgres, Redis cluster, a background job running task, etc. If you're not getting Cognito for cheap, you're better off just using libraries to roll your own auth service/module instead of going for any off the shelf auth SaaS or self-hosted solution.

Re: Amazon tripled prices for the basic tier of their auth service Cognito

#52

Post by AtlasBarfed »

paxys wrote: post #12

Here's the simple thing to know about AWS. They sell two great products (EC2 and S3) below market value so that you get locked in and their sales teams can upsell you on everything else. If you are a customer and are tempted to try out their alphabet soup of managed services because it all seems so convenient – don't.

... ?

Compared to Hetzner? Come on.

Amazon just prices S3 and EC2 at not-insane rates because they shadow charge you for I/O and network traffic at 10x a competitive rate, things that people don't actually look at when evaluating cloud providers.

Re: Amazon tripled prices for the basic tier of their auth service Cognito

#53

Post by mooreds »

akira2501 wrote: post #6

I think the author is confused. The previous "basic tier" is actually the "lite" tier. The prices are the same, but the number of "free" MAUs is reduced. The "advanced" and "essentials" tier include what seems to be new or expanded features like fully customizable logins and passwordless login options, so you have to pay more to access these features, but it looks like everything Cognito previously provided is in the…

Disclosure: I work for a competitor of Cognito, FusionAuth.

I agree, the author is totally confused.

Lite is equivalent was available before, and there's been a lot of improvements to essentials and plus (passkeys, more customization options). It is a bit weird that you have to be in the Plus plan to export user activity logs, but pricing is difficult. Depending on the number of users you had, lite can cost quite a bit more (5x for 60k users).

The simple pricing, which was one of the key benefits of Cognito, has become more complex. I put together a spreadsheet to show the price changes here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Nm5BUOjFlqqvaeDTERJm...

It's pretty clear that while there are increased features, if all you need is login, the pricing has increased significantly if you are above 10k MAU. If you are under 10k users, it's a wash, of course.

This spreadsheet ignores quota increase, SAML users, and M2M tokens, which are all charged separately.

However, you can see the plus tier, which includes what was previously "Advanced security features" has gotten significantly cheaper (pricing for that feature sourced from https://medium.com/@demandapi/aws-cognito-advantages-pricing... ). So bravo to them for lowering that.

There's also complexity in switching tiers, since if you switch from Plus to Lite in the middle of the month, you'll be charged Plus for all users who logged in before the switch and Lite for all after. That's incidental, but still added complexity.

And, as a sibling comment notes, there's legacy pricing for anyone who has a user pool with at least 1 MAU in the last 12 months. This legacy pricing lasts until Nov 30, 2025, which gives folks a chance to migrate or adjust business models.

Re: Amazon tripled prices for the basic tier of their auth service Cognito

#54

Post by skeeter2020 »

rafaelmn wrote: post #23
paxys wrote: post #12

Here's the simple thing to know about AWS. They sell two great products (EC2 and S3) below market value so that you get locked in and their sales teams can upsell you on everything else. If you are a customer and are tempted to try out their alphabet soup of managed services because it all seems so convenient – don't.

EC2 sold below market rate ? S3 I could argue somehow (unconvincingly). But what's the argument for EC2 ?

Lots of competitors have S3 equivalents with complete coverage of the S3 API interface; it's a pure commodity at this point.

Re: Amazon tripled prices for the basic tier of their auth service Cognito

#55

Post by hintymad »

paxys wrote: post #12

Here's the simple thing to know about AWS. They sell two great products (EC2 and S3) below market value so that you get locked in and their sales teams can upsell you on everything else. If you are a customer and are tempted to try out their alphabet soup of managed services because it all seems so convenient – don't.

Speaking great products, DynamoDB is pretty good too, to the point that there's no open-source equivalent to it yet. Cassandra probably comes the closest, but it does not have true GSIs, no cross-table transactions, no easy and robust CDCs like DynamoDB streams, and its CAS is dog slow.

SQS is great too. To many people it's reliable and durable, and implements a pretty robust competitive consumer pattern.

Re: Amazon tripled prices for the basic tier of their auth service Cognito

#56

Post by hintymad »

paxys wrote: post #12

Here's the simple thing to know about AWS. They sell two great products (EC2 and S3) below market value so that you get locked in and their sales teams can upsell you on everything else. If you are a customer and are tempted to try out their alphabet soup of managed services because it all seems so convenient – don't.

Lots of comments about EC2's price. My personal experience is that we do not just pay for the computing power of EC2 but the productivity it offers: it's just magical that one can launch an availability group across multiple zones, set up its autoscaling rules, and let it run wild. Netflix used to build its platform on top of EC2s, and the result was that a single engineer can carry a pager for multiple services 24x7, stateful included, and still enjoyed great work-life balance. It's also amazing how hard it is for companies to replicate their own EC2 in their own data centers.

Re: Amazon tripled prices for the basic tier of their auth service Cognito

#57

Post by AtlasBarfed »

gonzo41 wrote: post #27
usr1106 wrote: post #7

Drug dealer pricing? You start free and once you are on the hook exorbitant increases will come.

Drug dealers are sensitive to the price their market can bare, they don't let you use unlimited drugs then charge you at the end of the month.

They would if supply was unlimited and cheap but they had monopoly power of the market.

Oh, hello Purdue Pharma!

Re: Amazon tripled prices for the basic tier of their auth service Cognito

#58

Post by donavanm »

bilalq wrote: post #51

I don't understand why AWS doesn't put more effort into Cognito without messing with pricing. It is such an effective loss-leader. If you're someone who will go past the free tiers for Cognito, the rest of your AWS spend will almost certainly be a lot more. Take advantage of that and stop measuring the Cognito team's success by their revenue and profitability. Usage alone should be the goal. You're still billed for a…

> I don't understand why AWS doesn't put more effort into Cognito without messing with pricing. It is such an effective loss-leader

AWS team\org business priorities, like P&L computation, changed pretty drastically in 2022-23.

Historically there were a lot of services built, run, and measured on the idea of solving customers diverse needs and making AWS a better place to run your business. This isnt a “loss leader” per se, but 1) profitability may not be your highest business prioirty 2) customers & shareholders valued growth & diversity of offerings above almost everything else 3) business units would set forward looking pricing based on marginal rates 2-3 years out under better utilization models 4) services would not-uncommonoly use “attribution” or “flow through” revenue models for P&L. Eg autoscaling doesnt have a meaningfully price, but it drives (hypothetically) 3% of EC2 instance hours. Autoscaling than books a portion of the 3% of instance hour revenue to their profit center. Cognito (or Route 53 or SSM where I worked) would use this sort of P&L model.

Circa 2022 AMZn shareholders, amazon execs, and the market more broadly turned to Revenue and Profit as the goal, no longer growth per se. This drastically changed a lot of internal business models. No more “free rides”, book revenue, define and execute a plan to be a many million dollar direct revenue business, the old “growth and better together” story wasnt selling.

And i dont think thats a bad thing per se, as a shareholder. I appreciate the focus on proving your value via pricing and usage. But there will be some sad “abandonware” and service shutdowns over the next few years.

Re: Amazon tripled prices for the basic tier of their auth service Cognito

#60

Post by pajeetz »

jonahx wrote: post #37
pajeetz wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pocketbase, lucia auth, there are so many options that won't meter you for MAU for a user table in your database. authentication is critical, you shouldn't be outsourcing this stuff anyhow. learn how to harden your box, use cloudflare tunnel and dont store passwords in plaintext. its really not hard to do and constantly being gaslighted into paying someone to do it for you because everybody else is doing it is just i…

Very much agree with your attitude here. What happens is that nice to have features like email reset/email magic login/social logins/etc accumulate and you don't want to be on the hook for implementing them all yourself, especially with other priorities. Ofc there are open solutions for most of these in most popular languages, but I've found even those take non-trivial amounts of time to setup right and test, and oft…

I respect your view. I'm not involved with Lucia btw but i do feel v2 covers a lot of those edge case you described and for almost all sub 100k concurrent sessions I find pocketbase deliver here (if anybody is interested).

I guess one clear difference is the lack of a marketing department from something well funded. I recall another HN comment here that said the best business model is to take something people can do already and mark it up by selling the pain points, that could be whats also helping all these auth as a service vendors.

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