BOOTSTRAPPING ★ 6 upvotes 2019

Ask HN: A good way to support SSO in bootstrapped SaaS?

The Founder's Submission

Direct narrative and submission text authored by @gary__ on Hacker News:

I'm looking for an identity solution that allows me to offer SSO in a typical SAAS scenario:

-Multitenant support where tenants can be created in an automated fashion

-Allows SSO to be setup back to a tenant's own identity provider (saml2)

-There could be between 2 and 300 users per tenant. I'd be happy to have 3 tenants with 20 users each to begin with.

-No real need for logins to link to multiple tenants

Auth0 is expensive for this relative to where I am at. I'm on the .net core stack where identityserver4 is often used, but some of the (java) based offerings appear to come with more out of the box (for free). In saying that, integration with SAAS of this nature looks to complicate things. So I'd appreciate any advice from HN's experience on the options available.

Retrospective Overview & Key Insights

Distilled analysis of the business dynamics, operational challenges, and strategic takeaways:

Published in 2019, this chronicle by @gary__ details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing.

Core Principles for Independent Builders:
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Charging customers from day one acts as the ultimate filter for building software that solves genuine, high-urgency problems.
2
Keeping fixed overhead low and leveraging lean infrastructure allows founders to stay alive until market tailwinds kick in.
3
Small, repetitive improvements in customer retention and conversion rates yield massive returns over multi-year horizons.
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The community focused on B2B customer acquisition channels, cold email vs SEO distribution, and balancing full-time employment with side-project development.

Community Discussions & Critical Reviews

High-signal perspectives, counter-arguments, and peer founder insights debated on Hacker News (6 total discussions):

QU @quickthrower2 Peer Contributor

I rolled my own at work based on https://github.com/displayr/AspNetSaml which I forked from https://github.com/jitbit/AspNetSaml

There is a PR to make it work with .NET core at the moment.

Once you understand the protocol it’s a case of storing some fields relating to the IdP in your database, for each tenant. Redirect to the IdP website and they’ll redirect back to you and post a signed XML doc to daub Joe is authenticated and belongs to these groups.

MA @mariushn Peer Contributor

Unless I'm misunderstanding your needs, why wouldn't http://www.passportjs.org/ work? I've used it successfully for Google & Facebook signup/signin.

It has SAML support and I guess one of these packages could be customized to your needs? http://www.passportjs.org/packages/

DM @dmarlow Peer Contributor

I highly recommend ComponentSpace SAML SSO. There is a cost, but well worth it, imo. It's well maintained, support and forum available, fast responses, etc. I tried a few OSS, but they had some limitations that I couldn't get around in a short timeframe.

AV @avitzurel Peer Contributor

Used Auth0 before with great success. They support SSO and everything you need.

[edit] The right name this time

HISTORICAL ERA Cloud & Mobile Era (2014–2019)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 6 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 6 comments
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