Authentication for startups that grows with your product
A startup shipping its first product needs sign-in that works on day one, takes little engineering time and still holds up when the first business customer asks for single sign-on. The Skycloak Platform is built for that path: Skycloak runs the sign-in service, your application uses standard protocols, and a planned free tier covers up to 25,000 monthly active users.
Why a startup should not build its own sign-in
Sign-in looks small at the start, because a login form and a table of password hashes seem easy to write. The work grows quickly once you add password resets, multi-factor authentication, session handling and protection against leaked passwords, and each of those has security details that are easy to get wrong. For a small team, every week spent on that is a week not spent on the product your first customers are paying for.
Running an open source identity server yourself moves the problem rather than removing it, because someone on the team then has to patch, scale and back up that server. The Skycloak Platform is run by Skycloak as a service, so there is no server, database or upgrade on your side. Your application sends users to the Platform's sign-in pages and checks the tokens that come back, using OpenID Connect and OAuth 2.1.
What the planned free tier covers
The Platform's free tier is planned to open in 2027 and covers up to 25,000 monthly active users. An active user is someone who completes an interactive sign-in in a calendar month, so accounts that sit unused do not count toward that number. The tier has abuse limits to stop automated sign-ups and other misuse, and paid plans follow for products that grow past it.
Each of your environments, such as production, staging and development, is a separate tenant with its own users, settings and sign-in address on skycloakid.com. That lets you try changes in staging without touching real users, and you can add your own domain when you want sign-in to carry your product's name. You also choose each tenant's region, the United States or the European Union, when you create it, and its data stays there.
What happens when the first business customer asks for SSO
Startups that sell to businesses often get the same request from their first larger customer: its employees should sign in through the company's own identity provider. On the Platform's plan, organizations represent your business customers, each with its own roles, and enterprise SSO over SAML connects an organization to its identity provider. Inbound SCIM from Microsoft Entra ID, Okta or any SCIM 2.0 directory can then create and remove that customer's users for you.
Because these features sit on the same Platform as your first sign-in page, adding them does not mean a migration or a second identity system. Passkeys and multi-factor authentication are on the plan as well, along with a breached password check against the Have I Been Pwned data. The Platform is still being built, so a demo shows which of these you can use today and which are still planned.
Frequently asked questions
Can we leave the Platform later if we outgrow it?
Yes. The Platform is built to export a tenant to a Keycloak realm file, so your users can move to a Keycloak server you run. Because the Platform uses OpenID Connect, OAuth 2.1 and SAML, your application code is not tied to a private protocol either.
Do we need to run any infrastructure?
No. Skycloak runs the Platform, including its database, its upgrades and its sign-in pages. Your application only needs a standard OpenID Connect client library to sign users in and check their tokens.
See the Skycloak Platform for yourself
Book a demo and we will walk you through the Platform with your own sign-in flows in mind.