Pay per sign-in. The first 10,000 each month are free.

Pay per passage, not per seat

Most identity products charge per monthly active user: each person who signs in during a month is counted once, however often they come back. Obelisk charges one way: the Gate Toll. Each successful, interactive sign-in through the Gate is one passage — and every passage is already recorded as a hash-chained receipt. Token refreshes and silent re-validation inside a live session are free; you're only billed for a real authentication. Agent and MCP traffic is not metered today — a scoped grant issued to an agent, and every call your agents make to the MCP tool server, cost nothing. That is a deliberate statement of where the meter is today, not a promise about forever; if it ever changes it will change here first, with a new contract version, and never retroactively.

The toll

Every account gets 10,000 passages a month, free forever. Above that, the per-passage toll decays as volume rises — each higher band has a lower rate, so your effective cost per passage keeps falling the more you grow. The volume discount is automatic and the same for everyone. Billing is set up through the contact form for now.

Ask us about a committed rate — talk to us.

Current published contract. This schedule is the contract of July 31, 2026 (gateway-toll-2026-07-31); every billable passage carries that version for invoice and dispute traceability. Future price changes create a new forward-only contract and never rewrite prior usage.

What happens above 10,000

Sign-ins are counted per account: your personal apps count together, and each organization's apps count separately. Your account page shows this month's total across your personal apps and the organizations you run, and each organization's page shows its own count to its owners and admins. If an account without billing set up passes 10,000 sign-ins in a month, its apps keep working up to 12,000 sign-ins. Once it reaches 12,000, new sign-ins to those apps are refused until billing is set up or the next month begins (months follow UTC): the app's token request gets an HTTP 402 quota_exceeded error. Token refreshes are not counted, and the limit does not stop them, so people already signed in to an app that uses refresh tokens can stay signed in. Accounts with billing set up are never capped.

See your toll

Drag the slider to your monthly sign-ins and compare the Gate Toll with the published list prices of three per-user providers. The Obelisk figure runs the real bracket math — the same one that bills you. The others are list prices for sign-in alone, at about 4 sign-ins per user a month.

How the other columns are priced. Auth0: Free to 25k MAU, then B2C Essentials at $0.07/MAU, sold in tiers up to 50k MAU; above that we show no figure. Clerk: Hobby free to 50k retained users; Pro $25/mo with 50k included, then $0.02 falling to $0.012 per user. Clerk counts only users who return at least 24 hours after signing up, so its count, and its bill, can be lower than shown here. WorkOS AuthKit: Free to 1M users. Sources: auth0.com/pricing, clerk.com/pricing, workos.com/pricing, checked October 2, 2026. Your real Gate Toll is exact — every passage is a receipt.

What the toll pays for

The list prices above are for sign-in alone. If sign-in is all you need, Clerk and WorkOS cost less than Obelisk at every size in the three-size table below. Auth0 costs less at 10k users and more at 50k users; we cite no Auth0 list price at 250k users. The toll is priced for what comes with every Obelisk sign-in:

• Passkeys by default. Signing in with a passkey is the standard path for every account, not an add-on.
• A record you can check. Every billable sign-in is recorded as a hash-chained receipt, and the chain's head is published under an ES256-signed tree head that you can check against our published keys.
• Agents at no extra charge. Agent records in Agent Studio, each with an opt-in public Proof Link, and an MCP authorization server for your tools. Agent and MCP traffic is not metered today.
• The Obelisk Rating and a website security check. The Gate publishes a live 0–100 security score about itself, and you can run a free security check of your own website (its TLS, its HTTPS redirect and its security headers).

Take a SaaS with 50,000 monthly users who sign in about 4 times a month — 200,000 passages:

At 200,000 passages the Gate Toll (~$1,600) is below the list price of Auth0 (~$3,500) and above Clerk (~$0) and WorkOS (~$0). Sign-in alone costs less at Clerk and WorkOS; the toll pays for the list above as well, at an effective $0.0084/passage that falls as you grow. Why we think that's worth it → · Feature-by-feature comparisons →

The same comparison at three sizes, from the same list prices and the same toll:

Why one toll is the honest model

Obelisk does more than log a user in — it gives you security you can check: every passage is a hash-chained receipt under a signed tree head, so your bill is itself an auditable artifact, not a black box. A premium capability, priced like a utility, with nothing hidden behind a tier.

• Aligned: you pay when a user is actually, securely let in.
• Pro-growth: the toll falls as you scale; success lowers your unit cost.
• Auditable: every billable passage is recorded as a hash-chained receipt carrying its passage id, so each charge traces to a tamper-evident record.
• No tier tax: no plans, no seat minimums, no feature gates.