Build it, or start from it?
A license looks expensive next to $0. But $0 is not the alternative: your own team building the same foundation is. Here is what that actually involves, and when building it yourself is the right call.
The work you are comparing against
Not features you might want one day. This is the list of things enterprise customers assume are already there, and refuse to buy without.
- Authentication
- Password policy, lockout, email confirmation and reset, two-factor over email, SMS and authenticator apps, social logins, OpenID Connect, LDAP and Active Directory, ADFS, session timeout, active-session monitoring, login-attempt logging.
- Authorization
- A permission model that survives contact with real customers: roles, granular permissions, hierarchical organization units, user delegation, tenant and user impersonation, and permission-aware UI on every screen.
- Multi-tenancy
- Tenant isolation across every query, editions and feature gating, subscriptions with trials and renewals, Stripe and PayPal, invoicing, per-tenant configuration, branding and database strategy - single, per-tenant or hybrid.
- Operations
- Audit logging, entity change history, background jobs, real-time notifications, health checks, structured logging, caching, and the settings infrastructure that all of it reads from.
- The admin application
- Every screen behind the login that is not your product: users, roles, tenants, editions, subscriptions, languages, settings, audit logs, organization units - built three times if your team wants Angular, React and MVC.
- Keeping it alive
- A .NET major release every November, security advisories against the auth stack, framework and package upgrades, and the regression tests that let you take them without fear. This one never finishes.
Every line above is in ASP.NET Zero today and has been in production since 2013. See the full list if you want to check that claim before reading further.
There are three real answers, and one of them is not us
- Build it yourself
- Right when the foundation is the product, when your requirements genuinely do not fit anyone else's model, or when you have a team with time and a mandate to own it. You get exactly what you designed, and you carry it forever.
- Start from a free template
- Right for a prototype, a proof of concept, or an internal tool with one user type. Free starters get you to a running login screen quickly; what they rarely carry is multi-tenancy, a real permission model, audit logging, and someone maintaining it against next November's .NET release.
- License a foundation
- Right when the differentiated part of your product is above the foundation, and the foundation is table stakes your customers will simply assume. You trade a one-time cost for the months the foundation would have taken, and you still own the source code.
The build cost is the part everyone estimates. The maintenance is the part that surprises them.
A foundation is not delivered once. It is the code most likely to be attacked, and the code most exposed to the platform underneath it.
- .NET ships a major release every November. Something in the auth stack moves almost every time.
- Security advisories land against identity and token handling on their own schedule, not yours.
- Every enterprise deal adds a requirement to it: SSO with their provider, their audit format, their retention rules.
- The people who wrote it move on. What they knew about it usually goes with them.
- None of this work is visible to a customer. It competes for the same engineers as the features that are.
On a licensed foundation this is somebody else's roadmap. ASP.NET Zero has shipped 100+ releases and has been maintained against every .NET version since 2013, with a documented upgrade path for each one.
The published numbers
Not our estimates: outcomes our customers put their names to. Each one links to the story it came from.
Set those against the license: $2,999 for a team of up to 3 developers, one time, source code included. Apply your own loaded day rate to the months and the arithmetic finishes itself.
Check it against your own requirements
The question left is how long the foundation would take your team, and whether those months are better spent on the part of your product nobody else can build.
- Everything included: the full feature list, so you can check it against your requirements
- Pricing: one-time license, perpetual, no runtime fees and no per-user cost
- Live demo: see the admin application before you decide anything
- Talk to an expert: 30 minutes, free, and we will tell you if it is not a fit
Still weighing it up? Look at it first.
Explore the live demo, or book 30 minutes with the team that maintains it.