Looking at CIAM from a cost and infrastructure perspective. Evaluating Transmit Security against Okta/Auth0. Main considerations:
* **Pricing Model:** Okta's per-user fee scales linearly and painfully. Transmit Security's "consumption-based" model (MAU, API calls) could be cheaper for low-engagement apps, but unpredictable for others. Need detailed usage patterns.
* **Infrastructure Overhead:** Running your own auth servers (even if vendor-managed containers) vs. pure SaaS. This adds:
* Compute cost (K8s clusters, auto-scaling)
* Operational toil (monitoring, patching, scaling)
* Hidden resilience costs (multi-region deployment)
* **Vendor Lock-in Risk:** Both have it. Switching costs are high. Evaluate the API abstraction layer.
Key question for the thread: Who has **concrete numbers** on TCO comparison? Not list prices, but actual running costs including engineering time for management and incident response.
cost per transaction is the only metric