The SSO tax: why enterprises must end it and the opportunity it opens for Apple

The article, published in 9to5Mac's Apple @ Work column, raises a structural problem with enterprise software: the so-called "SSO tax" (single sign-on). According to the author, single sign-on should be a basic requirement included as standard in any SaaS subscription, but the industry's usual practice is exactly the opposite: vendors reserve it for their most expensive plans, often charging twice or three times the price of the base plan just to enable it.

The cost of this policy, according to figures cited from the author's own earlier article on Dashlane's Vault Enforcement feature, is that on average 37% of enterprise SaaS applications are not managed through SSO. That leaves a third of a company's application estate protected only by a username and a password, in a context where password manager adoption also remains low. The result, the author says, is entirely predictable: small and medium-sized businesses, seeing that SSO multiplies the starting price, choose to do without it, leaving security gaps that attackers exploit.

The piece notes that this is not a technical problem but one of incentives: identity providers charge per user, SaaS vendors charge for the integration, and the end customer ends up paying more for something that, the author argues, should be mandatory by default, in the same way no one would consider charging extra to enable multi-factor authentication.

As a counterexample, the article turns to a case the author knows first-hand from his career as a technology director in K-12 schools: Clever, the SSO and rostering platform used by the vast majority of school districts in the United States. Clever is free for schools and districts; it is the education app vendors who pay to appear in its gallery, because that is their route to customers. The model completely inverts the usual logic of the SSO tax: instead of the customer paying more for a secure login, it is the vendor who pays for access to the customer, and secure SSO comes included naturally in how the platform works. Over time, according to the author, districts themselves began to require Clever compatibility as a condition of purchase, and education software vendors were forced to integrate because losing sales cost them more than doing the integration. Clever was acquired by Kahoot in 2021 and still operates as an independent platform.

Building on this precedent, the article argues that Apple has a concrete opportunity: buy Clever. The thesis is that Apple already has most of the necessary pieces -Managed Apple Accounts, Apple Business, Apple School Manager, Platform SSO on macOS and Sign in with Apple- but is missing the connecting layer: a real identity service that sits between organizations and the thousands of SaaS applications they use, with an economic model that makes SSO free for the customer.

According to the author, acquiring Clever would give Apple three things at once. First, a proven platform and team that have successfully executed exactly this model at scale in the K-12 segment. Second, an immediate dominant position in identity for the education sector, an arena where Apple constantly competes with Chromebooks for device share and where today it is Google, through Google Workspace, that controls the login layer; owning that layer would make Apple's hardware "stickier" in schools. Third -and this is what the author finds most interesting- a model exportable to the enterprise market: an Apple-backed SSO, free for companies, funded by paid participation from software vendors, and deeply integrated into macOS and iOS.

The article imagines a scenario in which "works with Apple SSO" becomes a standard requirement in enterprise procurement, just as Clever support became a de facto condition in school district purchases: customers would demand it in negotiations, vendors would be forced to integrate it so as not to lose contracts, and the SSO tax would thus be, in the author's words, "dead." The text even points to the possibility of taking this further by integrating it with Apple's direct sales and provisioning processes.

The article closes with an overall reflection: the SSO tax survives because no one with enough market power has had the incentive to eliminate it. Apple, the author notes, has the financial capacity and already holds a dominant position in the enterprise segment; killing the SSO tax would be, by his argument, a clear way to generate enterprise services revenue without charging the customer directly, instead making software vendors pay for access, just as happens today with Clever in education.

It is worth noting that this is an opinion and analysis column, not a report on confirmed Apple plans: the text contains no statement from Apple or from Clever/Kahoot about such a deal: it is a speculative proposal by the author based on pieces already present in Apple's ecosystem and on the precedent of Clever's business model in the education sector.