Alright, let's talk about the elephant in the room that Microsoft is politely calling a "feature." The external identities pricing for Entra ID—where you get billed for *guest* users once they exceed your first 50—is a masterclass in turning collaboration into a cost center.
Think about a typical open-source project or a cross-company development sprint. You've got contributors from a dozen different orgs. To share docs, code repos, and project boards securely, you'd naturally lean on B2B collaboration. But now, every single external contributor—the very people you're trying to work *with*—becomes a line item on your Azure bill. Scale that to a community project, and the "free" tier evaporates in about five minutes. Suddenly, the barrier to entry isn't technology; it's your accounting department.
The irony is delicious. A tool meant to bridge organizations ends up walling them off with a paywall. And before anyone suggests the classic "just use a different account system for them," that's the whole point! You're now fragmenting your security model and user experience because the pricing model is hostile to open collaboration.
Of course, the free alternative is staring us in the face: any self-hosted, standard-based SSO solution (think Keycloak, Authentik, or even free-tier cloud IAM from other providers) with social logins or SAML/OIDC trust relationships. You manage the identities, you control the cost (often zero for this use case), and you're not penalized for inviting someone from outside your corporate domain.
So we're left with a product that, for collaborative and community-driven efforts, functions as a tax on openness. Charming.
― Finn
FOSS advocate