> There are a lot of other things that you're _not_ paying for which we have to price in - regular security audits, zero-day support, etc.
Yeah. I was hesitant to toss examples of actual costs in there because I knew it wasn't really a fair comparison, but I wanted to try to make my point even though I don't have the ability to calculate the real costs.
If I had to sum it up in a way that translates into a good strategy for building mutually beneficial relationships, I'd say "don't profit off my losses". I want a partner like relationship, but the only thing anyone is currently offering is for me to be a customer. I have to make all the predictions on conversion rates, etc., so I'm taking all the risk while the platform owner (ie: you) makes a (high-margin) profit off every user I have, regardless of whether or not I'm generating revenue from that user.
> for social websites, 1M users might be a low number. For B2B SaaS even 1,000 MAU could be high
I would say it makes sense to bucket users into categories and split the feature set accordingly. I think that's what Firebase does [1A]. I think basic login types (magic links, password, social) are free and you only pay for users that need their identity platform.
However, there are a few problems with Firebase IMO. First, I don't like "free". It means my costs aren't realistic and I need to assess the risk of that offering disappearing. IMHO that's just another layer of complexity and risk and I'd rather pay fair value from the start. The second problem with Firebase is that it's going to take a decade of culture change at Google for me to trust any of their products, especially something that's "free".
Back to Supabase, what do you do if you want to add a significant feature that makes the current auth pricing unsustainable? Do you increase the price a tiny bit? What if I have a million free users and don't need that feature for them?
> and we're an order of magnitude cheaper than other Auth providers
This is a little unfair on my part because I don't know the true costs, but if that means you're only charging me 100x the underlying costs vs everyone else charging 1000x, that doesn't make it good value for me, does it?
I'd rather categorize my users and pay accordingly. I know this may not be realistic in terms of creating too many SKUs, but just to make the point (from my perspective)...
1. Free users get magic links. Pricing should be tied to real costs and be commodity like. Minimal cost (to me) is important. Long term, stable, predictable pricing is important. This comes out of my pocket, so I don't want you having a large margin on it and I don't want it fluctuating because small changes can have a large impact on me if I have a lot of free users.
2. Convertible users get passwords, social logins, TOTP, security keys, etc.. Basically they get anything that doesn't have external costs (to you). I'd be willing to subsidize these a bit, but not anything crazy.
3. Paying users get SMS, etc.. Basically they get things that have external costs (to you). I'd pay a large premium for these users and I'd be willing to take on all the external costs in addition to that premium (ex: I pay for all SMS costs).
4. B2B users get any B2B features and my (inexperienced) opinion is they fall into a category where the cost (to me) doesn't matter much.
The other thing that I don't like about having a uniform cost per user is that I know the cost per user isn't uniform and, if my costs aren't a function of your costs, that means you're taking on some risk in the prices you've set. What if your overall prices are too low even though my specific usage is already profitable? Do I have to endure a price increase?
Again, this is uninformed because I don't have a decent knowledge of the true costs, but for my use case (magic links only, bring your own email) the prices feel 100x too expensive, but for a B2B use case they feel 100x too cheap.
I'm sure it's difficult to accommodate all use cases in a way that makes everyone happy, so hopefully my perspective is useful feedback.
1A. https://github.com/255kb/stack-on-a-budget/blob/master/pages...