SAML's Continued Awfulness and the Enterprise Auth Tax
A post titled 'SAML: A Fractal of Bad Design' generated significant discussion, with the most telling comment being: 'if you don't have SAML support, I can find a product that does.' Enterprise buyers treat SAML as a hard requirement, and SaaS founders have to implement it regardless of how badly designed the spec is. The thread also torched OAuth2 for good measure, with one commenter calling it 'utter utter shite.'
The pattern across this thread and related infrastructure discussions is that enterprise auth is a genuine tax on SaaS builders. SAML, OAuth2, and related SSO requirements consume significant engineering time for features that provide zero user-visible value, but without them, the enterprise sales motion stalls completely.
The specific complaint about 'connected network topology' requirements, where SAML's design assumes backchannel communication that many SaaS products don't want to enable, points to a real architectural incompatibility that no amount of good implementation can fix.
So what?
If you are moving upmarket toward enterprise, budget SAML implementation time honestly. It takes longer than it should and breaks in ways that are hard to debug. The comment thread has practical notes on what buyers actually require versus what the spec technically demands. Do not let a prospect die in the sales cycle over SSO that you could ship in a sprint.