The Free plan up to 10K MAU, Pro at $25/month with $0.02 per-MAU overage, and the Enterprise tier you don’t need until SAML and SOC 2 are on the table. Numbers verified against clerk.com/pricing.
Clerk publishes a clean three-tier ladder on clerk.com/pricing: a Free plan generous enough to take a real product to product-market fit, a Pro plan at $25/month with metered MAU overage, and a custom Enterprise tier that exists for the procurement-heavy crowd. Most solo founders never need Enterprise, often outgrow Free quietly, and trip on a few hidden multipliers in Pro. This guide breaks every layer with the actual MAU math.
Methodology. Plan caps, the $25 base, and the $0.02 per-MAU overage rate come from clerk.com/pricing and Clerk’s public billing documentation, last reconciled in May 2026. Comparisons against Supabase Auth use rates published at supabase.com/pricing. Clerk adjusts add-on pricing periodically — treat these numbers as accurate within a small margin, not gospel.
<SignIn/>, <UserButton/>, and <UserProfile/> componentsThe price gap between Free and Pro is small in absolute terms ($25/month) but meaningful in feature unlock — organizations alone justify the upgrade for any B2B SaaS. The gap from Pro to Enterprise is mostly about who your customers are, not how fast you’re growing. A solo founder with no enterprise-procurement-form-wielding customers should never need Enterprise.
Clerk’s Free plan is calibrated for early-stage products. The 10K MAU cap is high enough to take a hobby project, an indie launch, or a seed-stage SaaS through its first year without paying anything. What’s included on Free is unusually full: passkeys, social logins, MFA, and the React component library all ship at $0.
What’s not included on Free, and where you’ll bump:
The Free cap behavior is also worth knowing: Clerk doesn’t silently overage you. When you hit 10K MAU, sign-ins above the cap are blocked with a billing prompt — bad if you’re asleep when the launch hits HackerNews, fine if you’ve already enabled Pro defensively. The pragmatic move is to upgrade before a planned launch even if you’re still under the cap.
Pro is where Clerk’s pricing gets interesting because it’s genuinely simple: $25 base + $0.02 per MAU above 10K, monthly. There’s no seat math, no tiered feature gating beyond “you have everything,” and no surprise add-ons baked into the base.
The full feature unlock at $25 includes:
The $0.02 per-MAU overage is one of the cheaper rates in the auth-as-a-service market. For comparison, Auth0’s overage rates start meaningfully higher and grow with feature tier. Clerk’s rate is flat past the included 10K, which makes the math predictable: at 50K MAU, you pay $25 + (40,000 × $0.02) = $825/month. At 100K MAU, $25 + (90,000 × $0.02) = $1,825/month.
Enterprise on Clerk is custom-priced and not on the public page. Founders typically end up here for one of three reasons:
Pricing here is opaque on purpose — you’ll typically negotiate a custom MAU bucket, an annual commit, and an SLA. Reported numbers from public discussions suggest Enterprise contracts often start in the low thousands per month and scale with MAU and SSO seat counts. If you don’t have a customer asking for any of the gated features, don’t engage. Stay on Pro and let the meter run.
Three places where founders get surprised:
If you’re building B2B and every customer is a team of 5–15 members, your MAU count is roughly your active company count × average team size. A SaaS with 1,000 paying companies at an average of 8 active members per company is at 8,000 MAU — comfortably inside Free, but only barely. Hit 1,500 paying companies and you’re into Pro overage territory ($25 + (2,000 × $0.02) = $65/month).
The math is fine. The trap is that founders model MAU as “number of customers” instead of “total active humans across all customer accounts.” The latter is what Clerk meters.
Pro includes configurable session length, but enterprise-class session controls (persistent sessions, custom JWT lifetime, fine-grained device management) push you toward Enterprise quoting. If your product needs “keep me logged in for 90 days” behavior, Pro covers it. If you need device-level audit trails, that’s a different conversation.
SMS for MFA isn’t free at scale — Clerk passes through Twilio costs. If you have 50K active users and 30% have SMS-MFA enabled, that’s 15K MAU × ~2 SMS sends per month at Twilio’s pricing — an extra $20–$50/month buried as a line item, not in the headline. Push notifications, custom domains for auth screens, and additional regions are similar pass-through line items. None are huge individually; they add up.
Indie launch, hobby project, early seed-stage SaaS. Stays comfortably on Free. Only reason to upgrade is to remove Clerk branding or unlock organizations for a B2B product. Bill: $0.
Right at the Free cap, or a B2B SaaS that needed organizations from day one. Upgrade to Pro for $25 flat. No overage yet. This is the sweet spot for Clerk — full feature set, predictable bill.
Real product, real revenue, real bill. $825/month for auth feels steep until you compare it to the cost of running auth in-house at the same reliability bar. Still cheaper than Auth0 at the same scale.
Late-stage indie or VC-backed SaaS. At this scale founders start seriously evaluating whether to migrate off Clerk to a self-hosted Supabase Auth stack — the math starts working out.
The most common Clerk alternative for solo founders is Supabase Auth, which ships free as part of every Supabase project. Cost comparison at each scale (using public rates from supabase.com/pricing):
| Scale | Clerk | Supabase Auth (Pro project) | Delta |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1K MAU | $0 | $25 (Supabase Pro project) | +$25 Clerk wins |
| 10K MAU | $25 | $25 | tied |
| 50K MAU | $825 | $25 base + ~$50 in MAU overage | $750 Supabase wins |
| 100K MAU | $1,825 | $25 + ~$200 in MAU overage | $1,600 Supabase wins |
Supabase Auth wins on raw cost at every scale past 10K MAU. The trade-off is feature surface and DX: Clerk ships pre-built React components, organizations, and a polished hosted UI; Supabase Auth gives you the primitives and asks you to build the UI. We dive deep on the feature trade-off in our Clerk vs Supabase Auth breakdown and round up alternatives in the best auth library for Next.js guide.
Three triggers worth watching for:
For most solo founders shipping their first paid SaaS, none of these triggers fire in year one — Clerk Pro at $25 is the cheapest, fastest path to a working auth stack. If you’re wiring Clerk into a Next.js + Supabase Postgres app, the magic-link auth tutorial covers the data-side pattern; the solo founder tech stack roundup puts Clerk in context with the rest of the toolchain.
Stay on Free until 10K MAU or until you need organizations. Then go Pro and don’t look back until you’re past 50K MAU. Clerk’s pricing is honest in the way that matters: the headline numbers are real, the overage rate is published, and the only hidden cost is your own MAU model being off.
If your customers will eventually demand SAML and SOC 2, Enterprise is unavoidable — but you’ll know that day when it arrives, not before. For now, Pro at $25 covers the entire surface of what most solo founders actually ship.
The stack, prompts, pricing, and mistakes to avoid — for solo founders building with AI.