The State of the SSO Tax, 2026
Six years after the original wall-of-shame snapshot was first published, the SSO tax is still alive. The median premium for SAML-based SSO across 16 live-verified SaaS vendors is +150%. This is the first edition of ssopricing.com's annual independent report.
Headline numbers
- 34 vendors tracked across 9 categories — 16 live-verified, 8 industry-reported (vendor publishes pricing but pricing page blocks automated fetching), 10 quote-only.
- +150% median SSO premium across vendors with calculable deltas.
- 10 vendors gate SSO behind "Contact sales" — these are not scored but they are flagged.
- 5 vendors charge nothing extra for SAML SSO. They appear in green.
The five worst by percentage
- Copper (CRM): +1017% — $12/seat base, $134/seat with SSO.
- HubSpot (CRM): +650% — $20/seat base, $150/seat with SSO.
- Pipedrive (CRM): +607% — $14/seat base, $99/seat with SSO.
- GitHub (Developer Tools): +425% — $4/seat base, $21/seat with SSO.
- Intercom (Marketing): +355% — $29/seat base, $132/seat with SSO.
The categories that tax hardest
| Category | Median tax |
|---|---|
| Developer Tools | +208% |
| Design | +197% |
| CRM | +363% |
| Project & Work | +75% |
| HR & Payroll | +267% |
| Analytics | — |
| Communications | +72% |
| Security | — |
| Marketing | +355% |
The bright spots
A small but growing set of vendors have made SSO standard rather than premium. 1Password included SSO at the Business tier in 2024 after sustained community pressure. GitLab raised the lowest paid tier but kept SAML included from Premium. Cloudflare Zero Trust gives 50 free SSO users on the free plan. These are deliberate positioning choices — they read as security-first, and they undercut competitors who haven't done the same.
What changed since the last wall-of-shame snapshot
Compared to the community-maintained sso.tax: HubSpot's premium remains the largest in the index (+650%). GitHub raised SSO pricing from Team→Enterprise from a fixed dollar markup to a per-seat tier in 2024. Atlassian moved SSO from Premium tier into a separate "Guard" product — a structural rather than monetary change but it adds another premium tier. Salesforce continues to include SSO from Professional via My Domain (federated SAML still requires Enterprise).
What this report doesn't claim
We do not call vendors names. The SSO tax is a structural pricing choice; reasonable people disagree on whether it's a security failure or a legitimate enterprise-tier feature gate. What the data does show, unambiguously, is the magnitude. Whether that magnitude is justified is a procurement and policy conversation. This report supplies the numbers, dated and sourced.
How this report was built
Every figure in this report comes from the live data on the SSO Premium Index. The index reads from a single JSON file; the report regenerates from that file whenever it's published. See the methodology page for how each row is verified.