Clerk offers a free tier for up to 10,000 monthly active users, then charges a cent-level per-user fee that decreases with scale. Advanced features like SAML and impersonation are paid but free in development mode. SMS costs pass through to providers and vary in real time.
Chapters
Can you just paint a picture of how pricing and packaging works? Yeah, it's, it's quite complicated for us, unfortunately, because we have so many different things that we meter on. We have a huge free tier. It's super generous. We really want people to be able to use Clerk without paying us anything for as long as they need to really get their business on the rails. So the free tier lets you go up to 10,000 monthly active users. Beyond the free monthly active user limit, we charge you something like a cent or like 2 cents per, per month per active as you get more and more, we reduce that cost more to make it affordable for you. So the number of active users on your app is the like base driver of what you're paying Clerk, which we feel like is a pretty good approximation of what's fair to charge because it really represents the size and scale of your app. Then beyond that, we have like other like specific features that we put behind paid tiers because we feel like those are features that typically are used by larger organizations. Things like SAML connections, things like, I don't know, let me see. Impersonation would be one, right? Impersonation is a good one. All of our paid features, by the way, are also free when you're in development mode because it allows you to sort of like try them out without having to like go get a trial or anything from us and see like what works for you. But that's how we charge. And then we also have to charge for SMS, which is an interesting thing because we use it. We just pass through SMS to a provider. We don't make money off of those. We just pass through charge. But a lot of people use SMS. They use it for OTPs or they use it for other things. And we have to figure out a way to pass through pricing for that. As well. And also, if you are not familiar with SMS pricing, which I hope that nobody listening is because it's a mess, it changes in real time. Fun fact, the amount that it costs to send a text message to anybody anywhere in the world could be different from one second to the next second. And it's different per SMS provider. And so we have different SMS providers as backups because if one fails, then we can fall back to the other one. And so That's a whole crazy business. And the way we bill is at the beginning of the month, we charge you the base fee. If you're on a $25 a month plan, you get a bill for $25 at the beginning of the month. And then it also tacks on any like metered features from the previous month onto that one. So if you send 100 text messages and we charge you whatever, like $2 for that, then you would pay $27. So our pricing is actually completely insane.
