Published 2026-08-23 · reference numbers, verify before budgeting
WorkOS puts "free up to 1,000,000 MAU" right on its homepage. Clerk's free tier stops at 10,000. Auth0's stops at 7,500. Read those three numbers alone and WorkOS looks like it's giving away the product. Then a B2B customer asks for SSO, and the picture inverts completely — because WorkOS doesn't charge for MAU at all, it charges $125 per SSO connection, per month, flat, no matter how many users are behind it. We ran the actual crossover math, and it lands at a specific, surprisingly low number: 13,750 monthly active users.
All three vendors are priced completely differently once SSO/SAML is involved, which is the feature almost every B2B SaaS customer asks for during a sales call:
| Provider | Free tier | Beyond free tier | SSO/SAML add-on |
|---|---|---|---|
| Auth0 (Essentials) | 7,500 MAU | $0.023/MAU | +$150/mo flat |
| Clerk | 10,000 MAU | $0.02/MAU | +$50/mo flat |
| WorkOS | 1,000,000 MAU | $0.001/MAU past 1M | $125/connection/mo (this is the product) |
Rates as published on each vendor's pricing page, August 2026. Auth0 Organizations add $0.016/MAU; Clerk includes Organizations free; WorkOS SSO/Directory Sync connections are billed per connection, one connection assumed here. Report outdated price →
Say a single enterprise customer needs SAML, and we run the total bill for the whole user base at three scales:
| Total MAU | Auth0 + 1 SSO | Clerk + 1 SSO | WorkOS + 1 SSO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5,000 | $0 + $150 = $150 | $0 + $50 = $50 | $0 + $125 = $125 |
| 20,000 | $287.50 + $150 = $437.50 | $200 + $50 = $250 | $0 + $125 = $125 |
| 100,000 | $2,127.50 + $150 = $2,277.50 | $1,800 + $50 = $1,850 | $0 + $125 = $125 |
At 5,000 MAU, Clerk wins — its flat $50 SSO add-on undercuts WorkOS's $125. By 20,000 MAU, Clerk's per-user fee has already pushed it past WorkOS, and the gap only widens from there: at 100,000 MAU, WorkOS is still exactly $125 while Clerk has climbed to $1,850 and Auth0 to $2,277.50. WorkOS's number in this table never moves — that's the entire model. You're not paying for MAU, you're paying for the SSO connection itself.
Solving Clerk's SSO cost against WorkOS's flat fee: Clerk = $50 + (MAU − 10,000) × $0.02. Set that equal to WorkOS's $125 and MAU works out to 13,750. Below that line, Clerk is cheaper with SSO on. Above it, WorkOS is cheaper, permanently, because WorkOS's cost curve is flat and Clerk's keeps climbing. Auth0 doesn't even get a crossover point worth calculating — its $150 SSO add-on alone exceeds WorkOS's full $125 SSO price before a single MAU-based charge is added, so WorkOS is cheaper than Auth0 with SSO at every scale, starting from zero.
Auth0 and Clerk are consumer-auth pricing wearing a B2B add-on: their core meter is MAU because that's what a B2C app scales on, and SSO gets bolted on as a flat surcharge on top of a number that was never designed to describe an enterprise buyer. WorkOS was built the other way — it assumes the customer is already a B2B SaaS company selling to a handful of large enterprise accounts, so it prices the actual unit that matters to that business model: the SSO connection, one per enterprise customer, independent of how many employees that customer has logged in this month. Neither model is wrong. A consumer app with occasional enterprise logos genuinely fits Clerk's shape below ~13,750 users. A B2B SaaS product selling exclusively to enterprise accounts — where "MAU" might mean 40 users at a single Fortune 500 customer — is exactly the shape WorkOS was priced for, and the free-to-1M MAU tier stops being a gimmick and starts being the whole point: WorkOS isn't giving away user auth, it's giving away the meter it doesn't charge on.
If SSO isn't on the roadmap yet, none of this matters — compare Auth0, Clerk and Supabase Auth on total MAU cost with the Auth0 vs Clerk vs WorkOS pricing calculator and pick on developer experience. The moment an enterprise buyer asks for SAML, run the numbers again: under roughly 13,750 total MAU, Clerk's flat $50 SSO add-on is the cheapest path; past that line, WorkOS's per-connection model wins by a growing margin and the "free up to 1M MAU" headline stops being irrelevant and starts being the actual deal. If auth is bundled into a backend-as-a-service instead of a dedicated provider, size that path separately with the Supabase cost calculator or the Firebase vs Supabase comparison — both include auth in the base price with no separate SSO meter until you hit their own enterprise tiers.
Run your own numbers: the Auth0 vs Clerk vs WorkOS calculator takes your exact MAU and SSO requirement and ranks all three live. It's the same pattern we found comparing Vercel+Supabase against Cloudflare and raw AWS: the vendor with the scariest-looking free tier headline is often pricing a completely different unit than its competitors, and the only way to know which one is cheaper for your actual shape is to run the crossover, not read the homepage.
Figures are reference estimates (August 2026), taken from each vendor's published pricing page and the formulas used in our own Auth0 vs Clerk vs WorkOS calculator. SSO/SAML connection pricing can vary by contract size on WorkOS and Auth0 enterprise tiers — always confirm on the vendor's current pricing page before budgeting.