Your head of sales just closed the deal. It’s a landmark contract with a Fortune 500 company, the kind that validates your entire market position. The champagne is on ice. There’s just one, tiny line in the contract, buried on page 27:

“Vendor shall provide Single Sign-On (SSO) integration compatible with the Customer’s Microsoft Azure AD environment by Q3.”

Your CEO turns to you, the CTO. “This is great, right? The engineering team can knock that out in a few weeks. It’s a ‘simple’ SSO feature.”

You nod, but a familiar knot tightens in your stomach. You’ve heard “simple SSO” before. You know it’s a siren song, luring your best engineers onto the rocks of a thankless, months-long project.

Let’s break down what that “simple” feature really costs. The number might surprise you.

The Visible Cost: The Tip of the Iceberg

First, let’s look at the obvious. You assign two of your senior frontend and backend engineers to the task. The average fully-loaded cost for a senior engineer in a tech hub is around $175,000 per year, or roughly $85 per hour.

• Initial Build Estimate: 4 weeks (160 hours per engineer)

• Total Engineering Hours: 320 hours

• Initial Engineering Cost: 320 hours x $85/hour = $27,200

That’s not insignificant, but it’s a manageable line item. It’s the cost your CEO is picturing. It’s also only about 18% of the true cost.

The Hidden Costs: What’s Lurking Beneath the Surface

The real expense lies in what doesn’t appear on a project plan. It’s the drag on your most valuable resource: your team’s time and focus.

1. The Opportunity Cost: The Feature You Didn’t Build

Your two senior engineers are your most valuable creative force. For four weeks, they are not building the new AI-powered analytics dashboard that your product manager swears will increase user engagement by 15%. They are not optimizing the database query that’s causing customer churn. They are not architecting the new multi-tenant infrastructure you need to scale.

Let’s put a number to that. Your analytics dashboard is projected to increase retention, leading to an additional $50,000 in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR). A one-month delay pushes that revenue out, costing you $4,200 in this month alone. Over a year, that initial delay compounds.

But the real cost is strategic. Your competitor just launched their own dashboard. While your team is debugging SAML assertions, they are capturing market share.

Estimated Opportunity Cost: $25,000 – $50,000+

2. The “Maintenance Tax”: The Gift That Keeps on Taking

Think the project is “done” after the initial build? Wrong. You’ve just signed up for a permanent, recurring tax on your engineering resources.

• New IdP Requests: The next big client uses Okta. The one after that uses PingFederate. Each requires custom integration, testing, and edge-case handling. (10-20 hours per IdP).

• Library & Dependency Updates: The Node.js passport-saml library you used just had a major security vulnerability. You need to allocate an engineer for a full day to update, test, and redeploy. This will happen 2-3 times a year.

• The “It’s Not Working!” Tickets: When an enterprise customer’s SSO breaks, it’s an all-hands-on-deck emergency. Your engineers drop everything to parse cryptic error logs, only to find the client’s IT department misconfigured their own IdP. Each support ticket can burn 4-8 hours of engineering time.

This isn’t a project; it’s a permanent drag. Over the first year, this “tax” easily consumes another 2-3 weeks of engineering time.

Estimated First-Year Maintenance Cost: 120 hours x $85/hour = $10,200

3. The Security & Compliance Risk

SSO is the front door to your application. A single mistake in handling SAML responses or OIDC tokens can lead to a catastrophic security breach. Are your engineers experts in the nuances of XML signature validation, token replay attacks, and federation best practices?

Probably not. Their expertise is in your product.

A misstep here could lead to data exfiltration, reputational ruin, and the loss of enterprise customers. The cost of a single breach is incalculable, but for a SaaS company, it can easily run into the millions. You’re betting your company’s future on a “simple” feature that is outside your core competency.

Estimated Risk Cost: Priceless (But let’s allocate a conservative insurance premium of $20,000)

4. The Sales & Support Drag

Your sales team can no longer say “yes” to an enterprise prospect in a meeting. Now, the answer is, “Let me check with engineering if we support your specific IdP.” This creates friction and lengthens sales cycles.

Your support team now needs a playbook for SSO-related issues, which are notoriously difficult to debug and almost always involve the customer’s internal IT. This increases support ticket resolution time and burnout.

Estimated Cross-Departmental Drag: $15,000

The Grand Total: Tallying the Real Cost

Let’s put it all together in a simple table.

Cost CategoryEstimated First-Year CostInitial Engineering Build$27,200Opportunity Cost (Delayed Features)$40,000Maintenance & Support Tax$10,200Security & Compliance Risk$20,000Sales & Support Drag$15,000TOTAL ESTIMATED COST$112,400

And that’s a conservative estimate. If the initial build takes 6 weeks instead of 4, or if a critical security flaw requires a week of emergency re-architecture, you’re easily looking at a number closer to $150,000 or more.

All for a “simple” feature that isn’t even your product.

A Smarter Way to Win Enterprise Deals

It doesn’t have to be this way. What if you could offer enterprise-grade SSO to every customer, supporting every major IdP, without writing a single line of SAML or OIDC code?

What if you could tell your sales team, “Yes, we support it,” with 100% confidence?

What if your engineers could spend 100% of their time building the features that make your product unique and valuable, instead of maintaining undifferentiated infrastructure?

This is the problem we set out to solve with SSOJet. We are the identity experts. We handle the SAML, the OIDC, the security patches, and the maintenance tax. We provide a beautiful, well-documented API and SDK that lets your engineers integrate SSO in an afternoon, not a quarter.

With SSOJet, the cost equation looks radically different:

• Initial Engineering Time: ~8 hours

• Cost: ~$680

• Maintenance: $0

• Opportunity Cost: $0

• Security Risk: Drastically reduced, as it’s our core competency.

Stop paying the “simple” SSO tax. Your focus should be on building your product, not becoming identity experts.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from SSOJet - Enterprise SSO & Identity Solutions authored by SSOJet - Enterprise SSO & Identity Solutions. Read the original post at: https://ssojet.com/blog/the-hidden-150-000-cost-of-a-simple-sso-feature