Skip the SSO Tax, access your user data with OSS
As the former CTO of an Insurtech and Fintech startup I always had the “pleasure” to keep regulators and auditors happy. Think of documenting who has access to what, quarterly access reviews, yearly audits and so on… Like many others we couldn’t justify the Enterprise-plan for every SaaS tool to simply get access to SSO and SCIM/SAML APIs. For Notion alone the cost would have nearly doubled to $14 per user per month. That’s insane! Mostly unknown to people, SSO Tax also limits access to APIs that are used for managing user access (SCIM/SAML). This has proven to be an incredibly…
In plain words
This open-source tool provides SSO and user access management capabilities without requiring expensive enterprise plan upgrades. Designed for regulated industries and companies managing multiple SaaS tools, it enables users to control access documentation, perform quarterly reviews, and automate user provisioning through SCIM and SAML APIs. It addresses the "SSO Tax" problem where vendors charge significantly more for standard access management features that users need for compliance and auditing.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
As the former CTO of an Insurtech and Fintech startup I always had the “pleasure” to keep regulators and auditors happy. Think of documenting who has access to what, quarterly access reviews, yearly audits and so on… Like many others we couldn’t justify the Enterprise-plan for every SaaS tool to simply get access to SSO and SCIM/SAML APIs. For Notion alone the cost would have nearly doubled to $14 per user per month. That’s insane! Mostly unknown to people, SSO Tax also limits access to APIs that are used for managing user access (SCIM/SAML). This has proven to be an incredibly annoying roadblock that prevented me from doing anything useful with our user data: - You want to download the current list of users and their permissions? Forget about it! - You want to centrally assign user roles and permissions? Good luck with that! - You want to delete user accounts immediately? Yeah right, like that's ever gonna happen! It literally cost me hours to update our access matrix at the end of every quarter for our access reviews and manually assigning user accounts and permissions. I figured, there must be a better way than praying to the SaaS gods to miraculously make the SSO Tax disappear (and open up SCIM/SAML along the way). That’s why I sat down a few weeks ago and started building OpenOwl (https://github.com/AccessOwl/open_owl). It allows me to just plug in my user credentials and automatically download user lists, including permissions from SaaS tools. Granted, OpenOwl is still a work in progress, and it's not perfect. At the moment it's limited to non-SSO login flows and covers only 7 SaaS vendors. My favorite part is that you can configure integrations as “recipes”. The goal was for anybody to be able to add new integrations (IT managers and developers alike). Therefore you ideally don’t even have to write any new code, just tell OpenOwl how the new SaaS vendor works. What do you think? Have you dealt with manually maintaining a list of users and their permissions? Could this approach get us closer to overcoming parts of the SSO Tax?
More life & fun this month
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Launched alongside, April 2023
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- G4
Hi HN, Today we’re launching GPT-4 answers on Phind.com, a developer-focused search engine that uses generative AI to browse the web and answer technical questions, complete with code examples and detailed explanations. Unlike vanilla GPT-4, Phind feeds in relevant websites and technical documentation, reducing the model’s hallucination and keeping it up-to-date. To use it, simply enable the “Expert” toggle before doing a search. GPT-4 is making a night-and-day difference in terms of answer quality. For a question like “How can I RLHF a LLaMa model”, Phind in Expert mode delivers a…
AI · 2023 · phind.com
