What does SSO actually cost?

Across the five platforms, the cheapest published route to SSO is HubSpot's Sales Hub / Service Hub Professional at $90 per seat per month on annual billing. That $90 is not what leaves the account at signature. A mandatory onboarding fee of $1,500 applies on top, so even a single seat costs $90×12＝$1,080＋$1,500＝$2,580 in the first year, and $1,080 from the second year onward. Budget on $90 a month and the first year comes in roughly 2.4 times higher ($2,580÷$1,080＝2.39). The remaining three publish no price at all.

Meet two of these four tests and SSO is worth pricing

The four tests are user count, frequency of departures and role changes, requests for access records from clients or auditors, and whether anyone owns IT administration (thresholds are in the flow below). Two or more, and a quote is worth requesting; one or none, and the measures in the second half will cover it. Without an owner, deployment stalls even when everything else is in place.

Five terms to settle before requesting a quote

SSO (single sign-on)

A mechanism for signing in to each service with the company account. It consolidates the entry point and nothing more: a leaver's account remains on the SaaS side, and the per-seat charge keeps running.

SAML

One of the protocols behind SSO. "SSO supported" does not guarantee SAML — what Squarespace documents is OpenID Connect.

IdP

The system that manages employee logins centrally: Google Workspace, Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure AD), Okta and others. Running Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 means you already have one. SSO is a matter of connecting an IdP to a SaaS platform, so settle this first.

2FA / MFA (two-factor and multi-factor authentication)

Identity confirmation through an authenticator app or SMS in addition to a password. It is separate from SSO: SSO governs where people sign in, 2FA governs whether it is really them. Introducing SSO does not bring 2FA with it.

SCIM (automated provisioning and deprovisioning)

Deleting a user on the HR side removes the SaaS account automatically. Cutting off a leaver's access automatically requires this in addition to SAML SSO.

Only two of the five publish a price

These five are not substitutes for one another. The table shows where the one you already run happens to sit.

Units: US dollars, excluding tax. Per-seat prices for HubSpot, monday.com and Asana are annual-billing rates (monthly billing is higher at every vendor). Shopify publishes no annual price alongside the $2,300/month figure for Plus. URLs are mapped figure by figure in the Sources section below. Verified August 2026. Squarespace rechecked 8 September 2026.

HubSpot warrants a note of its own. SSO is not a specific product; it follows the grade of the Hub under contract. The official documentation lists Professional and Enterprise across the Marketing, Sales, Service, Data and Content Hubs, plus Smart CRM and Revenue Hub. The floor is the cheapest Professional — a single seat of Sales Hub or Service Hub. Marketing Hub Professional at $800 per month includes 3 seats, which is $266.7 per seat ($800÷3), and onboarding there costs $3,000. That is roughly three times Sales Hub: it is the price of Marketing Hub, not the price of SSO.

Squarespace is the case where that method fails. On monday.com and Asana the tier immediately below the SSO tier is published, so a quote has something to be measured against. Squarespace Premium is not on the published ladder at all: the pricing page lists Personal, Business Basic, Business Standard and Business Advanced, then sends Premium to a separate "Contact sales" section with no figure. The official help page states the condition and its edges: "This feature is for Premium and Enterprise customers only. It's not available for other plan levels and it doesn't apply to Acuity Scheduling Enterprise accounts." Premium is also a bundle rather than an SSO add-on — the official overview lists three things, page drafts, the shared Design Library and SSO — so anything there you do not need is still inside the same price. Ask for the figure and for what it covers in the same call.

Some platforms offer "sign in with Google" on a cheaper plan than SAML SSO, but not uniformly. On monday.com it requires Pro or above.

Enforcing 2FA on everyone splits four ways

2FA itself is available on lower-tier plans at all five. What differs is whether it can be enforced.

Only two platforms — Asana and Shopify — require a higher tier before enforcement is possible. On monday.com, "2FA is available on all plans, and admins are the only ones who can enable it for the account." On HubSpot it is already mandatory from Starter upward for every user who signs in with a password. On Squarespace, buying a higher tier does not let an administrator enforce it on other contributors: "There isn't a way to enable it for them." The assumption that enforcement costs money holds for only two of the five.

Audit logs come down to retention, not availability

HubSpot shows the most recent 30 days on screen. Login history and security actions are both held to 30 days; a full year is reachable only through an export. Squarespace retains 90 days, and monday.com has no retention limit, though the log is Enterprise-only. Incidents usually surface more than a month after the fact, so treat the 30 days as one opportunity to export and check.

If you skip SSO, three measures cover it

The floor of $90 per seat and $2,580 in year one becomes $12,300 for ten people ($90×10×12＋$1,500). For a company of ten or fewer with one or two joiners or leavers a year, the following three measures do more than that spend would.

1. Hold administrator accounts to two. This costs nothing. With no audit records, an incident with five administrators has five possible explanations; with two it has two. A single administrator leaves permissions frozen during an absence, so two is the floor.
2. Enforce 2FA. On monday.com it is a switch in the admin settings; on paid HubSpot accounts it is already mandatory. Written instructions are needed only for the lower tiers of Asana and Shopify, and for Squarespace.
3. Write a one-page offboarding deletion list. List the SaaS platforms in use and work down the sheet whenever someone leaves. Up to about five it holds; past ten, accounts get missed. That "ten" is the signal to start requesting quotes.

A password manager alongside this reduces the circulation and reuse of shared passwords. What it cannot prevent is equally clear. (a) A leaver's account stays on each service, and the per-seat charge continues until someone deletes it by hand. (b) Audit logs are restricted to higher tiers, so there is no record of who viewed what. The point at which those two become unacceptable is the point to request a quote.

So what should you do?

Fewer than 10 users and no more than 2 joiners or leavers a year — skip SSO. Hold administrators to two and write one deletion list. It costs nothing.

10 or more users, or 3 or more joiners and leavers a year — request a quote. Ask not for the monthly rate but for the first-year total including setup fees, the seat minimum, the minimum contract term, SCIM availability and audit-log retention. Leave out setup fees and seat minimums and the total will be wrong.

Already on a paid HubSpot plan — 2FA needs no action, and SSO alone can be evaluated on Professional ($90 per seat per month plus $1,500 up front).

Undecided — settle your IdP first. Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, or something else. Until that is fixed, no quote can be compared against another.

Sources (all verified August 2026)

Calculations: $90×12＝$1,080／$1,080＋$1,500＝$2,580／$90×5×12＋$1,500＝$6,900 ($1,380 per seat)／$90×10×12＋$1,500＝$12,300／$2,300×12＝$27,600／$2,300÷$90＝25.6／$19×12＝$228／$24.99×12＝$299.88／$800÷3＝$266.7

What could not be confirmed officially

• Seat minimums on monday.com Work Management paid plans (Basic / Standard / Pro / Enterprise): the "3 Seats" display was confirmed on the pricing page for the CRM and Service products, while the Work Management side defaulted to 10 seats. Whether a 3-seat floor applies to Work Management could not be confirmed in official documentation.
• Contract term conditions for Shopify Plus (one year or three years, and whether a variable platform fee applies): no statement was found on shopify.com/pricing.
• Annual pricing for Shopify Plus: the official wording is "from $2,300/mo" only, with no annual discount stated.
• Prices for monday.com Enterprise, Asana Enterprise / Enterprise+, and Squarespace Premium / Enterprise: none carry a figure on the official sites; all direct to a sales inquiry.
• The tier required for SCIM on Asana: the authentication options page states tier conditions for SAML explicitly, but the tier condition for SCIM alone was not confirmed on that page.

Terms and prices change, so confirm on each vendor's official page before signing.

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