I’m unhappy with Auth0 pricing for a startup

Totally reasonable—Auth0 can get expensive fast once you move beyond a small prototype, especially with MAUs, enterprise features, and add-ons.

If you’re a startup, the usual alternatives depend on what you need:

If you want hosted auth and less maintenance

• Clerk — very startup-friendly developer experience, but can also get pricey at scale.
• Supabase Auth — good if you already want Postgres/DB/backend in one place.
• Firebase Auth — simple and cheap for many use cases, but can be limiting for more custom auth flows.
• AWS Cognito — generally lower cost, but the developer experience is rougher.
• Stytch — strong auth APIs, modern UX, often better for passwordless / B2B auth.

If you want full control and lowest long-term cost

• Keycloak — open source, self-hosted, very powerful, but operationally heavier.
• Ory — more modern and flexible, but more infrastructure/implementation effort.

If pricing is the main concern

A common startup move is:

• use managed auth early to ship fast,
• then migrate later if costs or constraints become painful.

Things to compare before switching

• Monthly active user pricing
• SSO/SAML support
• Enterprise orgs / multi-tenancy
• Social logins
• MFA / passkeys
• Machine-to-machine auth
• Passwordless support
• Migration effort from Auth0
• Compliance needs

If you want, I can help you narrow this down by:

1. your stack,
2. whether you need B2B or B2C auth,
3. and your rough MAU/user growth.

Then I can suggest the cheapest realistic option, not just the “best” one.