That sounds crazy to me too. By comparison, Microsoft paid $7.5B for Github and Google paid $2.6B for Looker.

Idaptive, another IdP (I don't know how it compares in terms of features or client base) was bought by Cyberark for a mere $70M.

Makes GitHub look like the buy of the century. Which it may well turn out to be.

Enterprise customers with Enterprisey wallets.

Edit: Ping Identity might be a good place to invest, they look a bit low right now, and they support cloud and on-prem.

And own huge chunks of the enterprise market (and customers are generally happy at least in my circles).

I'm in the same boat and I use okta for work and have no clue what the hell it does or why this just can't be accomplished using open source.

Identity is a very sensitive area with strict cryptography and compliance requirement regarding password hashing, token signing etc. Then they have to keep updated with ever changing OAUTH/SAML standards and integration with providers like Facebook/Google etc. They have to get audited and certified like ISO 27001, HiTRUST etc. These are very expensive to manage and high risk for non-tech companies (think banks, insurance, utilities etc.) and hence are outsourced.

Whilst there certainly are great OSS solutions most big-ish corps already have Active Directory. You can setup ADFS to do SAML for SSO or you can use Azure AD which already has all that out of the box.

If you aren't a big-ish corp then yeah, there are tons of OSS ways of doing IdP that fit your specific tastes etc.

Check out Auth0's pricing page and it might start to make sense to you, they're outrageously expensive

Or the numbers in this comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26334736

If I recall okta’s monthly minimum is about 3k.

It's for the business and the users, obviously. Not just an API.

If it was easy to amass this many paying customers, surely other competitors would have rushed in to compete, right?

I’m completely shocked by this as well. This is the most insane valuation I’ve seen in a while.

Salesforce acquired Slack for $27.7 billion 2 months ago.

Slack is, imo, a way more complicated, way more valuable service targeted at a larger market than Auth0.

Have you ever heard of Snowflake?