What counts as an monthly active organisation | also how can I have a user belong to multiple tenant
Hi thanks for your great support, hope you're having a great day.
First off, on the pricing I notice you have a concept of monthly active organisations. Lets say I have a user belonging to 5 organization's and they login but don't switch into another org, does that mean only the orgs they returned tokens for count as active or all 5?
Second question, I have a free tier in my app, but still want users to be able to create multiple tenants (ironically similar to the auth0 setup), the issue is that would mean that even a free tier user will need to belong to an organisation, this will be prohibitively expensive for me as I expect to have many times more free users than paid ones.
An option to solve this was having a custom meta data on the user with a default org id which matches with my database but doesn't have an actual org in Kinde, the issue starts when that free user wants to make another tenant which they also don't plan to upgrade into a paid account. Pretty much all paid accounts will be upgraded into offical orgs in kinde and that is a good thing. My issue really only is when a user has two tenants that are both free.
does that make sense?
thanks for your time
5 Replies
I decided to ask the kinde ai and got this in response
For Monthly Active Organizations (MAO), Kinde has specific criteria for what counts as "active". An organization is only counted as active if it has:
At least 2 users AND
At least one of those users signs in to the organization during the billing period
if this is accurate than it means I should always just add the user with an org and can just make the teams function locked behind a paywall (which was the plan anyway)
Hi there,
Thanks for reaching out and for the detailed questions. Let me clarify both points:
Monthly Active Organization (MAO)
An organization is considered “active” for monthly billing purposes when it meets the following criteria:
- It has at least 2 users, and
- At least one of those users signs in to that organization during the billing period.
In your example, if a user belongs to 5 organizations but only signs in to one during the period, then only that one organization would count as active for billing. The others would not be counted unless they meet the sign-in criteria.
You can review more details on our pricing and activity definitions in our Kinde Pricing Documentation.
Multiple Tenant Membership for a Single User
Currently, Kinde's model associates each user with a single organization. For your free tier scenario where a user might need multiple “tenants,” a common workaround is:
- Default Organization Approach: Assign a default organization (using a custom meta field or your own database mapping) for free users. This way, free tier users only have one official organization in Kinde.
- Application-level Tenant Management: Manage additional tenant contexts on your side—locking the teams or tenant features behind a paywall. When a free user decides to upgrade, you can then create and manage official organizations in Kinde for each tenant.
This approach lets you avoid the overhead of creating multiple organizations (and incurring costs) for free users while still supporting multi-tenant functionality within your app.
Please let me know if this answers your questions or if you need further clarification on any of the points. I'm here to help
but if a org only counts as active monthly with two users I dont really have any reason not to create an org for every individual user right? Or is what youre saying is that one user cannot be associated with multiple orginisations? Based on a monthly active org only counting with 2 or more users I have no reason not to make an org per tenant (weather they are a single user in my free teir or not)
the part of your response I'm not fully understanding is below, if one user can belong to multiple organisations, then it seems you support my use case completely
Currently, Kinde's model associates each user with a single organization. For your free tier scenario where a user might need multiple “tenants,” a common workaround is:
Default Organization Approach: Assign a default organization (using a custom meta field or your own database mapping) for free users. This way, free tier users only have one official organization in Kinde.
Application-level Tenant Management: Manage additional tenant contexts on your side—locking the teams or tenant features behind a paywall. When a free user decides to upgrade, you can then create and manage official organizations in Kinde for each tenant.
currently my app is org based and has no concept of a user owning anything, I have a preference like this as it keeps a lot of flexibility around eventually upgrading, whats the downside for making a org per tenant?
Hi,
Just to confirm your main concern is around enabling users, especially those on the free tier, to create or be associated with multiple tenants without triggering additional costs. You’re aiming to ensure that billable organizations are only created when those tenants upgrade, while still preserving flexibility in how users interact with multiple tenants.
I’ll bring this to our billing team for further discussion and will review the available options internally. In the meantime, please don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any further questions
Hi,
I’d like to clarify a few details around billing and multi-tenancy, based on our current model and recent internal discussion:
Monthly Active Organization (MAO)
An organization is considered “active” for billing purposes if:
- It has at least 2 users, and
- At least one of those users signs in to that organization during the billing period.
So, if a user is the only member of an organization, and no one else joins or signs in, that organization will not be counted as active (i.e., it won’t trigger MAO billing).
Users and Organization Membership
To clarify a previous point:
- Kinde does not automatically associate each user with a single organization.
- In fact, a single user can belong to multiple organizations within Kinde.
Example:
- You have 5 organizations.
- A single user is the only member of all 5 organizations.
- These orgs will not be billed as MAO.
- If you then add a second user to each org, and different users sign in to different orgs, then each of those accessed orgs could be counted as MAO.
Multi-Tenancy Approaches
We see a few strategies that teams use to optimize flexibility and manage costs:
Option 1: Default Organization for Free Users
Assign each user a “default” org (via a custom field or in your database). Use your app to manage tenant-specific logic. Create full Kinde orgs only when users upgrade. Option 2: Hybrid Model
Use a mix of a primary org with app-level tenant management. This offers cost control while enabling future SSO, user roles, and other org-level features. --- You can also refer to these resources for deeper info: - Kinde Pricing - Kinde Docs: Multi-tenancy using Organizations Hope this clears things up! Let us know if you'd like help reviewing your current org structure or mapping out the best fit for your use case
Assign each user a “default” org (via a custom field or in your database). Use your app to manage tenant-specific logic. Create full Kinde orgs only when users upgrade. Option 2: Hybrid Model
Use a mix of a primary org with app-level tenant management. This offers cost control while enabling future SSO, user roles, and other org-level features. --- You can also refer to these resources for deeper info: - Kinde Pricing - Kinde Docs: Multi-tenancy using Organizations Hope this clears things up! Let us know if you'd like help reviewing your current org structure or mapping out the best fit for your use case
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