Last updated: October 31, 2026

AI Agent Authorization and Identity Pricing

An agent that can act without a permission boundary is not a feature. It is an incident waiting for a changelog entry.

Workforce identity: priced per seat

An AI agent needs the same thing a new hire needs — a bounded set of permissions, provable in an audit — except agents multiply faster than headcount and never sleep. The pricing model for workforce identity was built for humans and is now being stretched over agents: a per-user monthly fee, an annual contract, and a minimum that punishes small teams. Okta's published workforce pricing starts at $6 per user per month for Starter and $17 for Essentials, with a $1,500 annual minimum. Microsoft's Entra ID Premium P1 runs about $6 per user per month and P2 about $9 — and for organizations already paying for Microsoft 365, the marginal cost of core identity is often effectively zero, since it rides along with a subscription they already buy.

Okta Workforce Identity — Starter
$6 per user per month
● Baseline (October 2026) — trend tracking starts with the next refresh
No prior-period vendor price from the same comparison source was published.
Okta pricing, via Rippling comparison — source
Okta Workforce Identity — Essentials
$17 per user per month
● Baseline (October 2026) — trend tracking starts with the next refresh
No prior-period vendor price from the same comparison source was published.
Okta pricing, via Rippling comparison — source
Okta Workforce Identity — Core Essentials
$14 per user per month, billed annually
● Baseline (October 2026) — no prior-period figure for this tier was published in the comparison sources
Sits between Starter ($6) and Essentials ($17).
Okta pricing, via Tech Insider comparison — source
Okta Workforce Identity — annual minimum
$1,500 per year
● Baseline (October 2026) — trend tracking starts with the next refresh
Minimum spend; structurally uncompetitive below roughly 15–20 seats, per the comparison cited.
Okta pricing, via Tech Insider comparison — source
Microsoft Entra ID Premium P1 / P2
$7 / $10 per user per month
▲ Up vs prior ~$6 / ~$9
Prior figure shown: ~$6 / ~$9 per user per month (earlier comparison; pricing page updated October 22, 2026).
Entra ID pricing, via Tech Insider comparison — source

Customer identity: priced per active user

Customer identity inverts the model. Auth0, Okta's customer-identity cloud, charges per monthly active user rather than per seat: a free tier up to 25,000 MAUs, Essentials at $35 per month for 500 MAUs on the B2C plan ($150 for B2B), and Professional at $240 per month for 1,000 MAUs ($800 for B2B). That curve rewards apps with large registered-but-inactive bases and punishes apps whose users show up every day — the opposite shape from workforce pricing, and the reason an agent platform that authenticates both employees and end users usually ends up paying under two models at once.

Auth0 planB2C priceB2B price
Free tier$0 up to 25,000 MAUs$0 up to 25,000 MAUs
Essentials (500 MAUs)$35/month$150/month
Professional (1,000 MAUs)$240/month$800/month

Source: Auth0 pricing, via Rippling and Tech Insider comparisons — source · source

The connection tax

For teams adding enterprise single sign-on to a product, the unit is neither a seat nor an active user but a connection. WorkOS charges $125 per connection per month for its first 15 connections, and SSOJet Business from $118 per month (2 connections, $59 per connection billed annually). The agent-entitlement question sits one layer above all three models: whatever the billing unit, the product has to answer what an agent may do, what it may spend, and what it may never touch — and to prove the answer afterwards. Vendors that price only authentication will eventually be asked to price authorization, and the ones that already do will charge for it.

WorkOS — enterprise SSO
$125 per connection per month (first 15)
● Baseline (October 2026) — trend tracking starts with the next refresh
No prior-period vendor price from the same comparison source was published.
WorkOS pricing, via SSOJet comparison (verified July 2026) — source
Auth0 free tier ceiling
25,000 MAUs
● Baseline (October 2026) — trend tracking starts with the next refresh
No prior-period vendor price from the same comparison source was published.
Auth0 pricing, via SIIT comparison — source
Methodology. Figures below come only from the named public sources linked beside each figure. Where a source publishes a prior-period figure from the same series, the trend indicator compares against it. Where it does not, the figure is labelled as an October 2026 baseline and trend tracking starts with the next refresh. No proprietary dataset is reproduced in full: figures are summarized with attribution, and ranges are reported as published. Paywalled tables and login-gated data are excluded.
Disclaimer. These are aggregated public estimates for information only. They are not investment, financial, legal, or professional advice, and they are not a quote for any service. Verify current figures with the original source before acting on them.
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Changelog

Sources

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