Pricing behavior — Authentication & Identity
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Pricing
Pricing for AWS Cognito
How pricing changes as you scale: upgrade triggers, cost cliffs, and plan structure (not a live price list).
Sources linked — see verification below.
Freshness & verification
Pricing behavior (not a price list)
These points describe when users typically pay more and what usage patterns trigger upgrades.
Actions that trigger upgrades
- Need enterprise SSO for customers (SAML/OIDC with complex requirements)
- Need multi-tenant admin controls and audit features
- Need advanced policies and security workflows beyond defaults
- Need user migration at scale from an existing identity provider
- Need higher observability and operational support guarantees
What gets expensive first
- Engineering time is a real cost; SaaS CIAM can be cheaper in total ownership
- Identity edge cases accumulate (linking, recovery, device changes)
- Auth UX changes can ripple across mobile, web, and backend systems
- Security hardening requires explicit threat modeling and implementation
- Multi-region and latency requirements can complicate design
Plans and variants (structural only)
Grouped by type to show structure, not to rank or recommend SKUs.
Plans
- Usage - MAU-based - Costs scale with active users and flows (see pricing page)
- Security - Build-required - Policies, anomaly controls, and workflows depend on engineering
Enterprise
- Enterprise - Build-required - SSO/provisioning/audit features often need extra layers
Next step: constraints + what breaks first
Pricing tells you the cost cliffs; constraints tell you what forces a redesign.
Open the full decision brief →Sources & verification
Pricing and behavioral information comes from public documentation and structured research. When information is incomplete or volatile, we prefer to say so rather than guess.