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Clerk pricing, price hikes and cheaper alternatives

Clerk (clerk.com) is a auth provider. Free Hobby plan up to 50,000 monthly retained users (MRU) per app; Pro and Business add a base fee plus tiered per-MRU, per-organization and per-SSO-connection usage.. Free plan: Hobby: free, 50,000 MRU per app, up to 3 social connections, organizations up to 20 members, no enterprise SSO.

What Clerk costs

  • 10k MAU: free (Hobby free plan covers 50,000 MRU per app with Google login; no stored-user cap)
  • 100k MAU: $1,025/mo (Pro $25 + 50,000 MRU over the included 50,000 x $0.02 = $1,025)
  • B2B, 3 SSO: $275/mo (Pro $25 + Enhanced B2B add-on $100 (needed: ~50 members/org exceeds the 20-member basic limit; adds enterprise connection linking) + 2 extra SSO connections x $75 (1 included) = $275; 20 orgs within 100 free MROs)

Plan compared: Hobby (free). Prices are USD per month on monthly billing (annual-only plans divided by 12) for the vendor's hosted service: the headline is a production app with 10,000 monthly active users signing in with email/password and Google, and we also price 100,000 MAU and a B2B app with 1,000 MAU and 3 enterprise SSO customers. Free plans count when they allow production use at that volume.

What Clerk does

Core: End-user sign-up & login, Prebuilt login UI, Organizations & multi-tenancy.

Important: Social login, Magic links & one-time codes, Multi-factor authentication, Enterprise SSO, Roles & permissions (partly), Bot & fraud protection, Native mobile SDKs, Plans, entitlements & billing.

Also has: Passkeys, Custom auth flows (partly), Directory sync (SCIM), M2M tokens & API keys, OAuth provider & MCP auth, User import & export, Compliance & data residency (partly).

Clerk price hikes

  • Clerk began metering enterprise SSO connections on Pro · Feb 5, 2026
    Enterprise SAML/OIDC connections, previously unlimited under the retired Enhanced Authentication add-on, are now metered: 1 included, then $75/mo each (2-15). Clerk says apps with 3+ connections pay more.

Alternatives to Clerk

Clerk is the cheapest auth provider we track at 10,000 monthly active users. The others:

Clerk alternatives: 2 auth providers compared, at every size.

Every change we logged

  • Feb 5, 2026 · Limits cut: Using four or more Clerk Dashboard seats, and access to SOC 2 and HIPAA artifacts, now requires the Business plan (from $250/mo billed annually, $300 monthly).
  • Feb 5, 2026 · Limits cut: Enterprise SAML/OIDC connections, previously unlimited under the retired Enhanced Authentication add-on, are now metered: 1 included, then $75/mo each (2-15). Clerk says apps with 3+ connections pay more.
  • Feb 5, 2026 · Price cut: Free allowance rose from 10,000 to 50,000 monthly retained users per application, and unlimited applications were included in every plan.

Sources

Pricing page: clerk.com/pricing. Prices last checked Oct 16, 2026. Prices from clerk.com/pricing (monthly-billing figures; PricingSaaS shows annual-billed $20/$250). Pre-2026 add-on prices not stated in Clerk's changelog, so the SSO change has no computed percentage.