How are external identity providers billed?

What is an external identity provider?

In Zitadel, an External Identity Provider (IdP) is a third-party identity service —like Google, GitHub, Microsoft, Okta, Entra ID etc. —that you connect to your Zitadel instance. Instead of users creating a brand-new username and password for your app, they can "Login with Google." Zitadel acts as the broker: it sends the user to the external provider, gets a confirmation that they are who they say they are, and then logs them into your system.

How Billing is Calculated in Zitadel Cloud

In ZITADEL Cloud, external IdPs are treated as a usage-based unit. While you can configure as many as you like, you are billed based on how many are activated (ready for use) across your instances.

To calculate the monthly amount, we take the sum of of activated external identity providers over all instances on each day and calculate the average over a given month, rounded up to the next integer. Excluded are configured identity providers that are not activated.