The SSO tax, and why single sign-on is on our $30 plan

What is the SSO tax?

Single sign-on, or SSO, lets employees sign in to a product with the company account they already have, such as Google Workspace or Microsoft Entra, instead of a separate password. The company controls access in one place. When someone leaves, turning off one account closes every door.

The "SSO tax" is what people call the pricing habit of putting that feature out of reach. A product costs a few dollars a seat until you ask for SSO, at which point you need the enterprise tier, a minimum seat count, or a call with sales.

The best-known catalog of it is sso.tax, which calls itself "The SSO Wall of Shame": a public list of vendors that, in its words, "treat single sign-on as a luxury feature, not a core security requirement". It lists roughly 150 products. Where both prices are public, the jump from the base plan to the first plan with SSO is most often somewhere between 30% and 300%, and some entries are far higher. Many of its entries are several years old, so treat it as a picture of the practice, not a current price list.

Why vendors price it this way

The honest explanation is price discrimination. Asking for SSO is a reliable sign that a customer has an IT department and a budget, so it works well as the line between "small business" and "enterprise" pricing. The feature itself is rarely expensive to run. Sign-in with Google or Microsoft uses open standards that most products already support for their own login page.

There are real costs at the high end: custom identity providers, provisioning standards, and support for unusual setups. But those are not what a 12-person company needs. It needs "everyone signs in with their work Google account, and only that".

Why it is a security problem, not only a pricing one

When SSO costs several times the base price, small companies go without it. That leaves separate passwords for every tool, shared logins, and former employees whose access nobody remembered to remove.

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has said so directly. In a June 2024 post, "Why SMBs Don't Deploy Single Sign On (SSO)", CISA wrote that "single sign-on capability should be available by default as part of the base offering" and that customers "should not need to bear an onerous 'SSO tax' to get this necessary security measure". The same post notes that SSO "is often available only as a premium enterprise-level service".

CISA's accompanying report, "Barriers to Single Sign-On (SSO) Adoption for Small and Medium-Sized Businesses", is fair to vendors too: price is one barrier among several. Customers also "see SSO as a complex solution with numerous moving parts". Both problems are the vendor's to solve.

Why it matters more for e-signatures

An e-signature account is not an ordinary tool. It holds signed contracts, offer letters and customer agreements, and it can send documents in your company's name. Three things follow.

• Offboarding has to be immediate. A former employee who can still sign in can read every agreement they had access to and send new ones.
• Senders speak for the company. A signing request carries the sender's address. You want certainty about who can send from your workspace.
• Password reuse is the common failure. A leaked password from another site should not open your contracts.

What SignThis does

Single sign-on is included on every SignThis business plan. The lowest is Business Starter at $30 a seat a month, with no seat minimum. Business plans are billed monthly on a 12-month commitment. Every plan and its limits are on the pricing page.

How it works:

1. An owner signs in with the company's Google Workspace or Microsoft Entra account. The organization is taken from the provider's signed identity token, not from the email address's ending.
2. The owner turns on enforcement for the workspace. From then on, members can open that workspace's documents only from a session created by that provider and that organization.
3. Email-link sign-ins are turned away for that workspace, with a message that the company requires single sign-on.
4. Owners keep a recovery path. If the identity provider is misconfigured, an owner can still get in by email link after confirming it is them, and that use is written to the workspace's audit log. A broken provider cannot lock the company out.

Enforcement stays on if a subscription lapses, so canceling billing never bypasses a workspace's access policy.

What it does not include

This is single sign-on with the two providers most small companies use. It is not everything an enterprise identity team may want. SAML, other identity providers, SCIM provisioning and multi-factor authentication managed inside SignThis are not implemented. Enforce multi-factor authentication and account lifecycle at your identity provider; with SSO enforced, those policies apply to SignThis automatically.

One dated comparison

DocuSign's published eSignature pricing, as read on November 9, 2026, lists three plans with public prices: Personal at $11 a month, Standard at $30 a user a month and Business Pro at $45 a user a month, each on an annual commitment billed monthly. Its comparison table shows "Access management & SSO" as not included on all three. Single sign-on appears under its Enhanced plans, which have no published price and are sold through its sales team.

We are not saying that is unusual. It is the norm, which is the point of this article. DocuSign also offers a great deal that SignThis does not, including notarization, identity verification and a large catalog of integrations, and it can change its prices and plans at any time. SignThis is not affiliated with or endorsed by DocuSign, Inc. DocuSign is a trademark of its owner.

How to check any vendor's SSO pricing

Before you commit to a tool, e-signature or otherwise, ask five questions.

1. Which plan includes SSO, and is its price public? "Contact sales" usually means a multiple of the listed plans.
2. Is there a seat minimum on that plan? A 10-seat minimum is a tax on a 4-person company.
3. Can you enforce it? Optional SSO, where a password still works, protects much less than required SSO.
4. What happens when the identity provider is down? There should be an audited recovery path for owners, not a support ticket.
5. Does the audit log come with it? Knowing who signed in, and how, is the other half of access control.

Common questions

Does a five-person company really need single sign-on?

If the tool holds contracts or customer data, yes. The benefit is not convenience. It is that removing one company account removes all access, and that your identity provider's multi-factor rules apply everywhere.

Is "Sign in with Google" the same as SSO?

Not quite. A "Sign in with Google" button is an option any user may choose. Single sign-on enforcement means the workspace requires sign-in through your company's own Google or Microsoft organization and refuses anything else.

How much does SSO cost on SignThis?

It is included from Business Starter at $30 a seat a month, billed monthly on a 12-month commitment. Individual plans do not offer company SSO.

Which identity providers does SignThis support?

Google Workspace and Microsoft Entra. SAML and other providers are not implemented.

Where can I read how SignThis protects documents?

On the security page, including what the design does not protect against.