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Since launching from stealth around two years ago, it has been a pleasure and a privilege watching thousands of developers using Descope to power authentication and user management for their applications. Learning from customer use cases has also taught us that every app is different and that organizations need specific CIAM capabilities for different stages of their growth.
We’re excited to share our new and expanded pricing plans with the Descope community. Notable updates include a new Growth tier with handpicked capabilities for hypergrowth B2C and B2B companies, a drop in tenant pricing, and the availability of several new product capabilities in each pricing tier.
You can check out our new pricing tiers here. The rest of this blog will briefly cover each tier, what’s included, and which types of organizations would be the best fit.
Free Forever
CIAM is a core part of any app’s infrastructure. We have always believed that any developer should be able to add core authentication, authorization, and user management capabilities and take the app to production without speaking to anyone at Descope if they don’t want to.
Our Free Forever tier continues to make good on this commitment. All developers have access to foundational capabilities like:
Descope Flows: Our visual workflow editor that helps customers create and modify the entire user journey without writing custom code.
Connectors: An extensible ecosystem of 50+ third-party integrations that can be orchestrated from the same workflow where your user journey resides.
Auth method flexibility: Choose from a wide range of auth methods including passwords, magic links, OTPs, passkeys, social login, and authenticator apps.
MFA: Secure your customers with a variety of MFA options coupled with risk-based conditions that don't add friction for real users.
Step-up authentication: Add extra auth checks before sensitive user actions (e.g. transferring money, cart transactions).
Widgets: Embed customizable user admin components to empower your end users to manage their own profiles, roles, audits, access keys, and more.
RBAC: Create tenant-aware roles and permissions to enforce access controls for your app.
A/B testing: Iterate on your user journey without touching your codebase (e.g. introduce new auth methods, try different onboarding paths, show different auth methods based on geo).
M2M authentication: Securely authenticate and manage access keys for a variety of machine-to-machine authentication scenarios.
Scriptlets: Run custom JavaScript to manipulate data in the user journey to run mathematical, algorithmic and other operations.
The Free Forever tier comes with MAUs, tenants, SSO tenants, SSO apps, and M2M access tokens included, letting developers explore the entire breadth of the Descope platform without any gates.
If you’re reading this and don’t need any more convincing, sign up! No passwords needed.
Pro
You and your team have been grinding away for months working on your product. Your beta users, community, investors (or maybe investors-in-waiting) are all looking to you to push some buttons and present your creation to the world. As you go live and the users start pouring in:
You want onboarding and signup to “just work” and get them to the app quickly
You want your engineers collecting core product feedback rather than patching auth issues
You want to create a first impression that makes a second impression more likely
This is who the Pro tier is for. Early-stage startups that think like big companies and want to preserve engineering bandwidth for core product initiatives while also delighting and securing their initial end users and customers.
In addition to the sprawling set of capabilities in Free Forever, the Pro tier provides notable upgrades like:
Custom Domain: Use your branded domains for signup, login, OAuth consent, and other user-facing screens.
CI / CD integrations: Align user journeys with your SDLC by using templates with GitHub, Terraform, and Pulumi.
Google One Tap: Boost conversions, reduce anonymous users, and enable frictionless repeat visits with a simple frontend SDK integration.
Localization: Auto-translate user-facing screens to their preferred browser language, either with manual inputs or connectors with services like Amazon Translate, Lokalise, and Smartling.
SSO self-service configuration: Enable your customer tenant admins to set up their own SSO connections, including IdP selection, group and attribute mapping, testing, and end-to-end testing.
We have several happy Pro customers that appreciate the fast deployment, developer experience, and flexibility Descope provides for customer identity flows. You can catch up on some customer stories in this video playlist.
Growth
As we onboarded customers across sizes and industries, we realized that the authentication needs of an early-stage startup quickly mature and become specific once that startup becomes a high-growth company.
B2C growth apps with tens of thousands of users want to continue growing their userbase, improving conversions, and keeping out bad bots. B2B growth apps want to move upmarket and sell to large enterprises, which means making their identity management systems robust enough to meet complex enterprise needs.
This is who the Growth tier is for. In addition to all Pro capabilities, the Growth tier offers specific value to B2C and B2B growth-stage apps. Capabilities that will resonate with B2C apps include:
Anonymous users: Track unauthenticated users with a temporary token and tie traits to their user record when they sign up later. This is a great way to enrich user records with traffic source, attribution, and any other traits important for your business.
Bot protection: Prevent signup and login attempts from automated bots. Handle bots with flexibility by adding conditional steps in user journeys and creating branching paths for bots and real users.
Multi-region deployment: Store and process user data in the region of your choice (US and EU currently supported) to ensure regulatory compliance.
B2B apps can get enterprise ready with capabilities such as:
SCIM: Provision, sync, and deprovision user records across apps, including the ability to map custom attributes from the IdP to apps.
Fine-grained authorization (FGA): Implement granular access control like ReBAC and enforce checks before making authorization decisions.
SSO migration: Seamlessly migrate existing customer SSO connections without any tenant admin work. Descope will consume and migrate every customer’s SSO setup using DNS redirects.
Audit connectors: Descope audit events are accessible via the UI for all customers, but Growth tier customers can also leverage multiple connectors (Amazon S3, New Relic, Datadog) to stream audit events to their preferred observability tool.
Enterprise
We have built a platform that offers quick time to value for customers of all sizes. However, time to value is a sliding scale. While a startup can go live with Descope in a few hours without speaking with anyone on our team, large enterprises benefit from collaboration with our developer relations team to accelerate deployment and migration efforts.
For example, a large online fundraising platform with millions of monthly active users were able to entirely migrate their home-grown authentication to Descope in 4.5 months, a third of the time it would have taken with legacy CIAM providers. Or consider a Series J data and AI company with over 10,000 B2B customers that was able to offer a unified login experience across their support, help, and community portals in 3 months.
This is who the Enterprise tier is for. Large organizations with nuanced architectures, several apps and IdPs, and a range of stakeholders that need to log in. In addition to all Growth tier capabilities, the Enterprise tier gets:
Custom pricing tiered according to your user and tenant volumes.
Dedicated customer success engineering support during deployment and beyond.
Support for custom deployment options to align with your expectations for security and scale.
Conclusion
Descope is a drag & drop CIAM platform for any app. With our new pricing, just about any app can find the tier and capabilities they desire to improve customer experience, prevent account takeover, and get complete visibility over their user journey. We’re happy to hear your feedback and answer any questions.
If you have an active CIAM project, book a demo and see how Descope can help.
