Pricing & vendor selection

CIAM pricing is deliberately opaque. List prices are partial, the features you actually need sit in a higher tier, and two quotes rarely compare line for line — two vendors with the same per-MAU rate can differ 3x once SSO, SCIM, adaptive MFA, SMS, support, and residency are included.

Selection is a process problem, not a feature checklist. Define the job before you look at a vendor, separate must-haves from nice-to-haves, model cost at projected scale (12 and 24 months, not today), and trial the hard paths — passkey recovery, multi-tenant SSO, SCIM deprovisioning, a deletion request — because vendors demo the easy 80%.

These guides give you the pricing models, a vendor-neutral buyer’s process, a copy-paste RFP template, and the head-to-head comparisons to pressure-test a shortlist.