The Case for Monthly Active Users
As a development company dedicated to the open-source community, we strive to create code that can be used in perpetuity for identity projects all over the world. Gluu readily subjects its code to evaluation by various certification bodies and maintains a strong understanding of our obligations to meet these certifications.
For the past 10 years, Gluu has derived its revenue from consulting and support contracts, and, to a lesser degree, from licensed software components that support the Gluu distribution. We serve government, financial, and enterprise clients with this model all over the world. Regional and industry differences in economies have necessitated us to vary our pricing models depending on the type of environment and the organizational makeup.
This has tended to cause an imbalance of support requests and development needs. For instance, an education client may contact support dozens of times per year, whereas a large enterprise may call only once. In addition, the development needs for a government deployment to meet or maintain compliance for a citizen-facing application are less than those of a SaaS provider or publishing company managing social login for their website.
Some software development companies have adopted a per-user or per-node pricing model that attempts to make larger identity databases pay more than smaller ones. This also has the tendency to place an unfair tax on deployments where there are multiple identities and stymie their growth by effectively placing a tax on each user. This creates an imbalance, as many identity systems may sit idle holding hundreds of thousands of users, whereas smaller systems are pummeled with authentication requests from only a handful of users. Modern hybrid and cloud-native platforms with autoscaling technology can easily run a system with millions of idle users with minimal processing, whereas a smaller identity deployment that needs to meet high concurrency at the beginning of workdays or at critical times may need to scale to several hundred nodes at a moment’s notice. Why should these systems pay disproportionately?
It is time for a more modern approach to disperse the value of Gluu to each client we serve and share it to fund our efforts to develop leading software, and staff with responsive knowledgeable support. Gluu is not the only company to move to Monthly Active users. Both Google Identity and Amazon Cognito have adopted this model as it makes sense for Cloud computing to charge their client based on usage. So have other Gluu Cloud partners hosting MFA and Certificate Management solutions as well as Identity and Governance solutions. By adopting a similar pricing model Gluu can be sold as a part of an entire identity ecosystem and maintain uniform yearly costs.
Average Monthly Active Users (aMAU) is a measure of utilization and loyalty to an identity and access management system. If your organization can track increasing aMAU, it reflects more use or engagement with your product and allows you to derive more revenue or value from the service. We are sure this approach will help all our community consider our software and support, and it will help us dispense with the need to provide special pricing for Education or Government or expect our Enterprise clients to pay a high price on an initial deployment. In addition, we hope to support startup/SaaS companies by allowing them to pay an initially low aMAU. As success is derived from increased revenues, they can move to a higher tier, keeping the same value but taking advantage of a lower price tier.
Over the next few months, you can count on updates to our software that will help you calculate aMAU directly from the OxAuth/Admin interface or by safely querying your logs. We will always be transparent about how the metrics are derived and allow you and your organization to decide. We suspect that you will realize the value of our License, Support, and Maintenance program by helping to fund improvements to our products and by granting you access to enhancements from our development teams and access to knowledgeable, responsive support.
