I've been watching the zero-trust buzzword circus for a while now, and every time another SaaS platform like Banyan pops up, my first instinct is to reach for my spreadsheet. The sales pitch is always the same: "Simplify your secure access! Reduce operational overhead! Embrace the cloud-native future!" What they don't lead with is the monthly invoice that grows linearly, or worse, exponentially, with your device count, user base, or "throughput."
So here's my question to the room: has anyone actually sat down and done a proper, line-item cost analysis of adopting Banyan Security versus building a comparable zero-trust network overlay with something like OpenZiti?
I'm not talking about a back-of-the-napkin calculation. I mean a real TCO model that factors in:
* **The Obvious:** Banyan's per-user, per-device, or per-gateway subscription fees.
* **The Hidden:** The engineering hours saved (or spent) on not managing the control plane. But also the hours potentially spent wrestling with a proprietary system's limitations or API quirks.
* **The Infrastructure:** With OpenZiti, you're running your own controllers, gateways (they call them "routers"), and edge routers. That's compute cost (cloud VMs, k8s pods, or even on-prem metal), persistent storage, and networking egress. You need to model its scaling behavior.
* **The Labor:** What's the true ongoing maintenance burden? With a SaaS, it's theoretically zero for the infra, but you're now in vendor management and integration land. With OpenZiti, you're in deployment, monitoring, patching, and scaling land. Which team's skillset does that map to? What's the opportunity cost?
* **The Exit Fee:** This is the big one everyone ignores. Locking your zero-trust fabric into a proprietary cloud means a future migration is a monumental, re-architect-everything project. With an open-source stack, the fabric is yours. The switching cost is near zero.
I've sketched out the initial build for OpenZiti. It's not trivial, but it's also not rocket science. A basic production deployment for a few hundred services might look like a handful of instances:
```hcl
# Example Terraform snippet for Ziti Controller infrastructure (highly simplified)
resource "aws_instance" "ziti_controller" {
count = 3
ami = data.aws_ami.ubuntu.id
instance_type = "t3.large" # Needs modest CPU/memory
subnet_id = aws_subnet.private.id
root_block_device {
volume_size = 100 # GB for logs, databases
}
tags = {
Name = "ziti-controller-${count.index}"
}
}
```
The real cost isn't these three VMs. It's the knowledge required to secure, network, and automate them. But my cynical view is that the knowledge required to deeply understand and troubleshoot a third-party SaaS black box is often comparable, yet you're left without any levers to pull when it's slow or expensive.
I suspect the SaaS model wins for the first 12-18 months on pure cost, but the lines cross eventually. The real debate is whether your finance department prefers a predictable, ever-increasing OPEX line item or a more variable CAPEX/OPEX mix tied to your own infrastructure scaling.
Has anyone crunched these numbers and lived to tell the tale? I'm particularly interested in scenarios beyond 500 users or 50 services, where the monthly SaaS bills start to look like a second mortgage. Did you find Banyan's value-add features (their specific UI, reporting, or pre-baked integrations) to be worth the premium, or were they just glossy veneer on a standard set of zero-trust principles you could implement yourself?
monoliths are not evil
I'm a senior security engineer at a mid-sized fintech, and we run our own zero-trust overlay using OpenZiti in production to secure internal admin apps and a few external partner connections.
* **Real monthly cost:** Banyan will hit you for $8-12 per user per month on their enterprise tier, and that's before you add any "premium" support or custom features. With OpenZiti, our hard cost is just the compute for the controllers and routers - about $400 a month on AWS for our scale (500 users). The trade-off is that $400 doesn't include my team's salary.
* **Deployment and integration effort:** Banyan took us about two weeks to pilot for a simple web app. OpenZiti's initial PoC took six weeks, and that was with dedicated time. The real time sink wasn't the core setup, but writing the automation to handle certificate rotations and router failover that Banyan gives you out of the box.
* **Where it clearly breaks:** If you need to support a non-technical, mobile user base with a dead-simple client experience, Banyan wins. Their client 'just works'. OpenZiti's client requires a heavier enrollment process we've had to build internal tooling around. For contractor or third-party access, Banyan is less friction.
* **The lock-in and hidden cost:** Banyan's pricing model is a classic land-and-expand. You start with "secure access," but to get things like detailed audit logs or custom policy engines, you're talking to sales. With OpenZiti, you own it all, but the hidden cost is needing someone on staff who understands the control plane architecture well enough to debug it at 3 a.m.
I'd pick OpenZiti if you have the in-house platform/SRE skills and your use case is primarily machine-to-machine or internal user access. Pick Banyan if your primary driver is supporting external users or contractors and you want to hand off operational liability. To make the call clean, tell us your team's headcount for supporting this and whether you need to authenticate non-employees.
Trust but verify.
That's a great breakdown, especially the point about the hidden effort in automation. We went through something similar with our private cloud setup.
Your $400 AWS bill for 500 users is a helpful benchmark. I'd add that the "team's salary" part gets more nuanced if you already have a platform SRE or infra team. Rolling your own ZTNA can become just another platform service they manage, so the marginal cost isn't always a full headcount.
Totally agree on the client experience being the killer difference. For our devs and admins, the heavier OpenZiti enrollment is fine. We'd never ask our marketing team to use it. Sometimes the answer is a hybrid approach - internal stuff on the open-source stack, external/less-techy users on a managed service.
Dashboards or it didn't happen.