Small SaaS sits in an awkward middle for SSO. Auth0 is built for companies 10× your size and priced for it. Firebase Auth is a weekend-prototype tool. Self-hosting eats engineering time you don’t have. What actually works?
What you need at this size
Below 50 employees, your SSO requirements are concrete:
- Social sign-in (Google, GitHub, Microsoft) for self-service B2C and small-team B2B
- A fast path to enterprise SSO (SAML) when the first qualified deal requires it
- SCIM provisioning when the enterprise customer asks for it (not before)
- Predictable, flat-ish pricing that doesn’t scale punitively
- Time-to-ship measured in hours, not sprints
You don’t need: twelve-tab admin consoles, custom rules engines, enterprise compliance certifications beyond SOC 2.
The LoginWith pitch, specifically
LoginWith was built for exactly this size. The decisions map cleanly onto what you need:
- Two-tag sign-in: a
<script>tag loading the SDK, and an<a href="https://google.loginwith.link">link. Ship social sign-in in 30 seconds. For static sites, no backend required at all. - Full SDK when you outgrow the two-tag setup: drop in
@loginwith/sdkfor PKCE, session management, token refresh. Same auth backend, same user records, no migration. - Enterprise SSO as a paid add-on: SAML and SCIM are $199-300/month per enterprise customer. You don’t pay unless you have that enterprise customer. Your pricing scales with your revenue, not with your aspirations.
- Flat platform fee, per-managed-user pricing: $0 on Free (unlimited auth, you manage users), $99/mo platform fee on Growth + $0.02 per managed user (2k included). No MAU tax — active users don’t increase your bill.
- Branded hosted login pages at
{yourslug}.loginwith.pagefor free. If you wantlogin.yourcompany.com, custom domains are on the Pro tier.
What this gets you at 10k users
Concretely, at 10,000 managed users:
- LoginWith: $99 + 8,000 × $0.02 = $259/month, flat
- Auth0 B2C: ~$800-1,500/month, varies with active users
- Clerk Pro with MAUs: ~$225-400/month, scales with active users
- Firebase Auth: free, but SAML/SCIM unavailable or paid, multi-tenancy limited
The cheapest isn’t always the right answer — but when your product scales, you want the predictability.
Architecture for enterprise-readiness
The second reason LoginWith fits the “under 50 employees” band: it’s architected for the deal that comes at ~50 employees. Your first enterprise prospect asks “do you support SAML?” — and with LoginWith:
- Your tenants are already multi-tenant
- Your
auth_providerrouting is already in place - Enabling SAML for a specific customer is a toggle, not a rewrite
That “two weeks vs two quarters” difference is what closes the deal instead of stalling it.
Why not roll your own at this size
We wrote a whole post on this. The short version: building auth is ~5 weeks of initial work and ~5 weeks/year of ongoing maintenance. For a startup with 3-5 engineers, that’s 5-10% of your team’s time on something that isn’t your product, forever. Managed auth flips this into a $100-300/month line item and lets your engineers build features.
Getting started
LoginWith’s Free tier covers unlimited auth with social sign-in and hosted login pages — more than enough to launch with. Upgrade when you have paying customers and need user management, branding, or multi-tenancy.
For small SaaS, this is the setup that takes you from “MVP with login” to “closing enterprise deals” without a single auth rewrite along the way.