Stytch Free Credits: $1,000 in credits

Deal Highlights

Authentication is the part of your product nobody thanks you for and everybody notices when it breaks. It is also deceptively expensive to build: password reset flows, session management, MFA, device trust, breach detection, and eventually SAML for your first enterprise customer. Stytch exists so you can ship all of that without dedicating an engineer to identity for a quarter.

The distinguishing choice is that Stytch is API-first and passwordless-first. Magic links, one-time passcodes, biometrics, and passkeys are the primary paths rather than bolted onto a password form. For a product being built now, that ordering matches where authentication is actually heading.

What Is Stytch?

Stytch is an authentication and user management platform delivered as APIs and SDKs. You call it to sign users up, log them in, manage sessions, and enforce security policy, rather than building and maintaining that logic yourself.

It ships two distinct products. Consumer authentication covers B2C applications: magic links, OTP over SMS or email, OAuth with the usual providers, passkeys, and passwords with breach detection. B2B authentication covers the requirements that appear the moment you sell to companies: multi-tenant organizations, SAML single sign-on, SCIM directory sync, and role-based access control.

That second product is the strategic point. In most auth platforms, SAML and SCIM are enterprise-tier upsells that arrive exactly when a deal depends on them. In Stytch's B2B product they are first-class features rather than an upgrade conversation.

What's Included in This Deal

• $1,000 in credits applied against Stytch usage
• Full API and SDK access across consumer and B2B authentication
• Passwordless methods: magic links, OTP, OAuth, and passkeys
• Session management with configurable lifetimes and revocation
• Security features including breach-resistant password handling and device fingerprinting

Against a free tier that already covers a meaningful user base, $1,000 in credits pushes the point where authentication becomes a real line item well into your growth curve.

Stytch Pricing: How the Model Works

Stytch prices on monthly active users (MAU), meaning users who authenticate in a given month rather than total accounts registered.

Published pricing in this category has moved more than once recently, so confirm current rates before modelling a budget.

The MAU distinction is worth understanding properly, because it works in your favor. A product with 50,000 registered accounts where 8,000 people log in during a given month is billed on the 8,000. For products with long tails of dormant accounts, which is most consumer products, that is a substantially lower number than total signups.

Where the cost concentrates is B2B. At roughly five times the consumer rate, the Growth tier reflects that SAML, SCIM, and multi-tenancy carry real engineering weight. That is still dramatically cheaper than building them, and the comparison to make is against engineering months rather than against the consumer tier.

Stytch vs Auth0 vs Clerk vs WorkOS

The decision usually comes down to two questions.

Do you want components or APIs? Clerk gives you prebuilt, well-designed UI that gets a React app authenticating in an afternoon, at the cost of fitting into their model. Stytch gives you APIs and headless SDKs, which means more work and full control over the experience. If your signup flow is part of your product design rather than a form to get past, that control matters.

Do you need enterprise features, and when? WorkOS is purpose-built for bolting SSO onto authentication you already have, priced per enterprise connection, which is elegant if your existing auth works and you just landed a customer demanding SAML. Stytch is the better answer if you are choosing authentication now and know enterprise customers are coming, because you avoid running two systems.

On raw price, Auth0 sits at the expensive end at comparable volumes, which is why it appears so often in migration stories rather than in new builds.

The Real Cost of Building Auth Yourself

The honest comparison is not between auth vendors, it is between buying and building.

A basic email-and-password system with reset flows and sessions is genuinely a week or two of work. That estimate is where teams get into trouble, because it is also where the scope ends and the obligations begin.

What follows: rate limiting on login attempts, secure password hashing kept current, session invalidation across devices, MFA when a customer asks, OAuth providers each with their own quirks, breach password checking, suspicious login detection, audit logging, and eventually SAML with its per-identity-provider inconsistencies. Then it needs maintaining forever, because authentication is a permanent security surface rather than a shipped feature.

The cost that actually bites is not the initial build. It is that a security incident in authentication is among the most damaging failures a startup can have, and the expertise required to avoid one is specialized. At $1,000 in credits and a free tier covering early growth, the arithmetic strongly favors buying until you have a specific reason not to.

Passkeys, and Why They Matter Now

Passkeys are the most consequential change in consumer authentication in years, and understanding them helps you decide how much weight to give a passwordless-first platform.

A passkey replaces a password with a cryptographic key pair. The private key stays on the user's device, protected by their fingerprint, face, or device PIN. The site stores only the public key. Nothing secret sits in your database, which means a breach of your systems cannot leak credentials, because there are none to leak.

The practical benefits stack up. Passkeys are phishing-resistant, since the key is bound to your domain and will not authenticate against a lookalike site. They cannot be reused across services the way passwords are. And they are faster for users: a fingerprint rather than typing a password or waiting for an emailed code.

The complications are real too. Passkeys sync through the platform ecosystem, meaning Apple, Google, or a password manager, so a user moving between an iPhone and a Windows machine may not find their passkey where they expect. Shared devices are awkward. And a meaningful share of users still do not know what a passkey is, so the enrollment prompt needs explaining rather than presenting.

The sensible pattern is passkeys offered as the primary method with a reliable fallback, usually OTP, always available. Adoption climbs over time without ever locking anyone out. Building this correctly from scratch, across browsers and platforms, is exactly the kind of work a platform should absorb.

Session Management Decisions Worth Making Deliberately

Authentication gets the attention, but sessions are where most real-world security problems live.

Session lifetime is a genuine trade between security and friction. A banking product should expire sessions in minutes; a consumer app that logs people out daily will lose them. Decide based on what an attacker with a stolen session could do, not on a default.

Revocation must actually work. When a user changes their password, logs out, or reports a device stolen, every other session should die. Systems that issue long-lived tokens without a revocation path cannot honor that, and it becomes apparent at the worst moment.

Refresh behavior determines whether an active user is ever interrupted. Sliding expiry, where activity extends the session, keeps engaged users signed in while still expiring abandoned sessions.

Device visibility is increasingly expected. Letting a user see active sessions and end them individually is both a security feature and a trust signal, and it is far easier to adopt from a platform than to retrofit.

Who Should Use Stytch?

Use it if you are building a product now and want passwordless as the default experience. Passkeys in particular are becoming an expectation, and implementing them well from scratch is not trivial.

Use it if you are building B2B SaaS and expect enterprise customers within a year. Having SAML and SCIM available before the deal requires them turns a blocking issue into a configuration step.

Look elsewhere if you want the fastest possible path to a working signup in a React app with minimal decisions, where Clerk's components will get you there sooner. Also look elsewhere if you already have working authentication and only need enterprise SSO, where WorkOS solves that narrower problem at lower cost.

Real Startup Use Cases

A B2C mobile app shipped with magic links and OTP only, never storing passwords. Support volume that would otherwise have gone into password resets simply did not exist, and the security surface of storing credentials was removed entirely.

A B2B SaaS company chose Stytch's B2B product before landing its first enterprise deal. When a prospect's security review required SAML SSO and directory sync, the answer was a configuration exercise measured in days rather than a roadmap commitment measured in quarters. That timing decided the deal.

A developer tools startup used passkeys as the primary method for a technical audience that appreciated them, keeping OTP as a fallback. Adoption was high precisely because the audience understood the security benefit, which is not true for every user base.

How to Claim the Credits

1. Follow the link on this page to Stytch and create an account.
2. Choose the right product path, consumer or B2B, before writing integration code. They are separate products and switching later means rework.
3. Apply the credit in billing and confirm it appears before you scale usage.
4. Start in the test environment, integrate one authentication method end to end, then add others.
5. Configure session policy deliberately: lifetime, refresh behavior, and revocation on password change or logout.
6. Monitor MAU in the dashboard so the transition from free tier to paid is predicted rather than discovered.

Tips for a Clean Implementation

1. Pick consumer or B2B correctly at the start. This is the one decision that is expensive to reverse. If companies rather than individuals will be your customers, start with the B2B product even if the first users look individual.
2. Implement one method well before adding more. A reliable magic link flow beats four half-tested options. Add methods as users ask.
3. Always provide a fallback. Passkeys fail on shared devices and unfamiliar browsers. OTP as a backup path prevents lockouts that become support tickets.
4. Test the unhappy paths. Expired links, reused codes, revoked sessions, and switched devices are where authentication actually breaks, and they rarely appear in a demo.
5. Do not store what you do not need. Passwordless removes credential storage from your risk surface. Keep it that way rather than adding a password option nobody asked for.
6. Watch MAU against your free tier. Crossing the threshold mid-month is fine if expected and unwelcome if not.
7. Keep your user identifier stable and internal. Store your own user ID as the primary key and treat the provider's ID as a reference. It keeps a future migration, to another vendor or in-house, from touching every table you own.
8. Log authentication events from day one. Sign-ins, failures, method changes, and session revocations. Enterprise security reviews ask for this, and reconstructing it after the fact is far harder than capturing it as you go. It also gives you the audit trail you will want the first time a customer asks who accessed their account and when.

Who Is This Deal For?

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