Kinde

Kinde is an Australian-built, all-in-one developer platform that bundles authentication, access management, billing and feature flags in a single dashboard — pitched as the antidote to stitching Auth0 + Stripe + LaunchDarkly together. We rate it 82/100 — for early-stage SaaS founders, indie hackers and small teams who want production-grade auth, MFA, RBAC and feature flags without the Auth0 pricing cliff, Kinde is one of the best value-for-money platforms in 2026, with a generous 10,500 MAU free tier and SOC 2 + ISO 27001 compliance baked in.

What is Kinde?

Kinde was founded in November 2021 in Sydney by Ross Chaldecott (CEO, ex-Atlassian, ex-Campaign Monitor, ex-Shopify), David Berner and Evgeny Komarevtsev. The team raised a $10.6M seed round led by Blackbird Ventures with participation from Felicis Ventures, and has positioned the product squarely against Okta-owned Auth0 by undercutting on both price and total surface area — auth, billing and flags ship as a single integrated platform rather than three separate vendors.

The core thesis is that modern SaaS teams burn weeks gluing identity, billing and entitlements together, and that gluework breaks every time pricing or roles change. Kinde collapses the stack: a single SDK call gives you a logged-in user, a subscription tier, and feature flags scoped to that user — no webhooks between vendors, no role drift, no double-billed customers in your MAU count.

Key Features of Kinde

• Full auth surface in the free tier: Passwordless email and SMS, social login (Google, Apple, Microsoft, GitHub, Facebook), MFA, custom domain, M2M tokens and Roles & Permissions are all included on the Free plan — features that typically sit behind $240+/month tiers at Auth0.
• Built-in feature flags: Boolean, string and integer flags scoped to users, organizations or environments — bundled at no extra cost, removing the need for a separate LaunchDarkly or Statsig contract on smaller teams.
• Stripe-powered billing & subscriptions: Metered billing, plan entitlements, trial management and a 0.7% per-transaction fee on the Free plan. Paid customers on your own plans do not count toward your Kinde MAU allowance, which removes the most-hated Auth0 tax.
• B2B organizations & RBAC: Multi-tenant organizations, organization-scoped roles, custom permissions and per-tenant branding via the no-code Page Designer.
• Workflows & custom code: Run server-side TypeScript at every step of the auth flow — pre-registration checks, post-login enrichment, M2M validation — without standing up your own webhook infra.
• Compliance & security: SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certified, MFA, brute-force and bot protection, audit logs, plus enterprise SSO (SAML, OIDC) and SCIM on higher plans.
• SDKs that don't fight your stack: First-party libraries for Next.js, React, Vue, Svelte, Python, Go, Ruby, PHP, .NET, Flutter, iOS, Android and a generated GitHub family of starter kits.

What Users Say About Kinde

Sentiment across G2, Capterra, Software Advice and the official Kinde community forum is consistently warm — the product holds a 4.7/5 average across 40+ reviews, and the most-upvoted comment patterns are about how quickly teams get live ("two to five minutes" is repeated by multiple Next.js reviewers) and how unusually responsive the founders are on GitHub and Slack. Reviewers consistently praise the migration story off Firebase Auth and Auth0, and several call out that the team has actually shipped feature requests that started as forum posts.

The recurring complaints are equally specific: the admin dashboard is not always intuitive — particularly when locating organization settings — webhook coverage trails Auth0 ("I want better webhooks to sync users into my own DB" is the single most-cited request on G2), CSV user import has rough edges, and documentation occasionally lags shipped features. Honest takeaway: less polished than Clerk on the React component side, but materially cheaper at scale and with a wider feature surface per dollar.

Kinde Pricing

Kinde has five plans. Every plan, including Free, includes 10,500 MAU. Paid customers on your plans don't count toward your MAU. There are no setup fees.

Plan	Price	Key Limits
Free	$0	10,500 MAU, MFA, RBAC, social/SMS/email, custom domain, billing (0.7% per transaction), feature flags, M2M, workflows
Plus	From $25/month	Everything in Free, plus enterprise connections, advanced security, removed branding, priority email support
Scale	From $149/month	SAML SSO, SCIM provisioning, advanced compliance, 99.9% SLA, audit log retention
Enterprise	Contact sales	Custom MAU, dedicated environments, SSO for admin team, named CSM, 24/7 support
Kinde Care add-on	From $499/month	White-glove migration, architecture reviews, priority Slack channel

Who Should Use Kinde?

Best for: Solo founders, indie hackers and seed-to-Series-A SaaS teams who want auth, billing and flags from one vendor without paying Auth0 prices — particularly Next.js, Remix, Astro and React Native teams who want hosted auth pages, custom domains and feature flags inside the free tier.

Not ideal for: Pure B2B enterprise teams that need SCIM and SAML on day one (WorkOS is more focused), React-only consumer apps where polished pre-built UI is the priority (Clerk's components are still ahead), or apps that need deep, custom event-driven webhooks for every user lifecycle event.

Pros and Cons

Pros:

• Generous 10,500 MAU free tier — among the most generous in the auth-platform category.
• MFA, RBAC, custom domain and feature flags included on Free — features Auth0 typically gates to $240+/month.
• Paid customers on your own plans don't count toward your Kinde MAU.
• SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certified, with MFA and bot protection out of the box.
• Founders ship fast and respond directly on GitHub, Slack and Discord.
• Auth + billing + feature flags in one platform reduces glue code and vendor count.

Cons:

• Admin dashboard navigation can be unintuitive for first-time users.
• Webhook coverage is thinner than Auth0 — the most common feature request.
• Pre-built React components are less polished than Clerk's.
• CSV user import has rough edges; some users still need support to migrate.
• Documentation occasionally trails newly shipped features.

Alternatives to Kinde

The two most direct competitors are Clerk — better React DX and pre-built components, but pricier per MAU and no native billing — and WorkOS, which has a more generous 1M-MAU AuthKit free tier and dominates enterprise SSO/SCIM but does not bundle billing or feature flags. Auth0 remains the most flexible enterprise option but its escalating per-MAU pricing is the single biggest reason teams migrate to Kinde. For pure open-source self-host, FusionAuth and Keycloak are the obvious alternatives — but neither comes with billing or feature flags built in.

Verdict: Is Kinde Worth It?

For early-stage SaaS teams under ~10,000 MAU, Kinde is one of the best deals in the 2026 auth market — you get production-grade authentication, MFA, RBAC, organizations, billing and feature flags in a single dashboard, with SOC 2 and ISO 27001 compliance, for $0/month. The product is genuinely less polished than Clerk on the component side and webhook coverage trails Auth0, but the pricing math is hard to argue with: roughly $0 for the same features Auth0 charges $240+/month for. We rate Kinde 82/100 — it loses points for dashboard friction and webhook depth, but for the founders Kinde is built for, it is comfortably the best-value option in the category.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Kinde free?

Yes. Kinde's Free plan includes 10,500 monthly active users with no credit card required, plus MFA, RBAC, custom domain, social/SMS/email login, billing (with a 0.7% per-transaction fee), feature flags, M2M tokens and workflows.

What platforms does Kinde support?

Kinde is a hosted SaaS — fully web-based — with first-party SDKs for Next.js, React, Vue, Svelte, Node, Python, Go, Ruby, PHP, .NET, Flutter and native iOS/Android.

How does Kinde compare to Auth0?

Kinde matches Auth0 on the core authentication surface (MFA, RBAC, social, passwordless, custom domain) but bundles billing and feature flags that Auth0 doesn't ship. Pricing is materially cheaper — most teams report 60–90% lower bills versus Auth0 at the same MAU — and paid customers on your own plans don't count toward your Kinde MAU. Auth0 still wins on enterprise depth and webhook coverage.

Is Kinde open source?

The Kinde platform itself is closed-source, but the SDKs and starter kits are MIT-licensed on GitHub.

Is Kinde SOC 2 compliant?

Yes — Kinde is SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certified, and provides MFA, brute-force protection and audit logs across all paid plans.

Does Kinde have an affiliate or referral program?

Yes. Kinde's referral program pays 20% commission on everything a referred customer spends with Kinde for the first year, and gives the new customer a $50 Kinde credit valid for 3 months.