Authress is a pay-per-call authentication and authorization API. See 2026 pricing, features, pros and cons, and how it compares to Auth0.
Authress is a cloud-based API that provides both authentication and authorization for applications, aimed specifically at developers who need fine-grained control over what authenticated users are permitted to do, not just who they are. It is operated by Rhosys AG and, per public company databases, was founded in 2018 by Dorota Parad, with the company based in Winterthur, Switzerland.
Unlike identity providers that treat authorization as a secondary, role-based add-on, Authress is built around resource-based access control from the start, letting teams assign permissions down to individual records or objects rather than only broad application-wide roles.
Authress positions itself as an unfunded, independently operated alternative to larger CIAM vendors, and it emphasizes a single, transparent pay-per-call pricing model rather than tiered plans that gate features behind higher-priced tiers.
Authress issues JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) for authenticated sessions and supports unlimited single sign-on connections across SAML, OAuth, and OIDC, plus social login and machine-to-machine tokens for service-to-service authentication.
Its authorization layer supports granular, resource-based permission checks, enterprise sign-up and invitation flows, and multi-language SDK support (the company references support across 26-plus languages for its client libraries and documentation).
Operationally, Authress advertises a 99.995 percent availability SLA and encrypts data both in transit and at rest, targeting production applications that need reliable, low-latency access decisions.
Authress uses a single usage-based pricing model rather than multiple named plans: customers pay 0.0012 US dollars per billable API call, with only actual authentication and authorization calls counted toward billing.
The first 1,000 billable calls each month are free, which lets small projects and prototypes run at no cost before usage-based billing kicks in.
The company describes this as having no enterprise tax, meaning every customer, regardless of size or spend, gets access to the same full feature set, including SSO, social login, and fine-grained authorization, without needing to upgrade to a higher tier to unlock them.
Authress provides a combined authentication and authorization API, handling both user login and fine-grained, resource-based access control decisions.
Authress uses pay-per-call pricing at 0.0012 US dollars per billable API call, with the first 1,000 calls each month free.
According to public company records, Authress was founded in 2018 by Dorota Parad and is based in Winterthur, Switzerland, operated by Rhosys AG.
Yes, Authress is commonly compared to Auth0 as an authentication and authorization alternative, with a stronger emphasis on fine-grained authorization.
Yes, Authress supports unlimited SAML, OAuth, and OIDC single sign-on connections on every plan.
Yes, the first 1,000 billable API calls each month are free before usage-based billing applies.
Resource-based authorization assigns permissions to specific resources or records rather than only broad, application-wide roles, allowing more precise access control.