Kinde vs BuildBase: which parts of the stack do you actually replace?
Kinde is auth with billing attached. BuildBase is a backend with auth attached. The difference decides which one fits.
In short
Kinde replaces your auth provider and adds billing on top. BuildBase replaces auth, billing, metering, workspaces, RBAC and workflows as one instance. If you need SSO for an enterprise buyer this quarter, pick Kinde. If you are about to wire four vendors together, the bundle wins.
Most "X vs Y" auth posts compare login screens. That is not the decision. The decision is how many vendors you are going to own the integration between, and for how long.
Kinde and BuildBase both claim to be more than auth. They mean different things by it.
The one-paragraph answer
Kinde is an auth provider that added billing. BuildBase is a backend that includes auth. If your next problem is "an enterprise buyer wants SAML", pick Kinde and move on - we do not ship SAML. If your next problem is "I need metering, quotas, workspaces and RBAC and I am about to buy four things", the bundle is the cheaper path, and the rest of this post is about why.
What each one replaces
Kinde replaces Auth0 or Clerk, and takes some of Stripe's job with its billing features. You keep your database, your background jobs, your notification provider, your metering.
BuildBase replaces more of the middle. Authentication with eight sign-in
methods, workspaces with membership and RBAC, subscriptions and credit metering,
workflow automation, email. It ships as @buildbase/sdk against one instance,
so the pieces already know about each other. A quota belongs to a workspace, a
workspace has members, a member has a role, and none of that is glue you write.
A bundle is only cheaper if you would have bought the pieces anyway. Need auth and nothing else, and you are paying for surface you will never use.
Pricing, verified 19 September 2026
Kinde publishes its numbers, which is more than most of this category manages. Free is $0 with 10,500 MAU. The paid ladder runs Pro at $25 a month, Plus at $75, and a Scale plan at $250 that has appeared since we first wrote this. The MAU allowance does not grow as you climb: it is 10,500 on every tier. Past it, Pro charges $0.0175 per extra user and Scale $0.0151.
Two lines on that page are newer than this post. Organizations are metered now. A paid plan includes 50 monthly active organizations and Pro charges $0.50 for each one after that, though an organization with a single active user is not counted. Billing through Kinde also costs a cut of every customer transaction: 0.7% on Pro, 0.5% on Scale.
Our side comes out of the repo rather than a web page. Launch is $49 a month, Grow $99, Scale $199. There is no free plan. The trial runs 7 days and does not ask for a card, which is the part people miss when they read "no free tier" and stop. Current numbers live at /pricing.
| Feature | BuildBase | Kinde |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | No free plan, 7-day trial | $0, 10,500 MAU |
| Entry paid plan | $49/mo (Launch) | $25/mo (Pro) |
| Per extra MAU | Not MAU-priced | $0.0175 (Pro) |
| Enterprise SSO | Not available | 1 connection free, unlimited on Plus |
| Scope | 20 modules, one instance | Auth plus billing |
The detail worth noticing is that users on paid subscriptions are not counted as MAU. Bill your users through Kinde and the MAU meter mostly stops mattering, with the transaction fee taking its place. Good decision. It removes the usual reason auth costs surprise people at scale.
Where the models diverge
Per-active-user pricing is the category default, and BuildBase does not use it. Not for the sake of being different: MAU is a poor proxy for what a metered product costs to run. Take a workflow tool where 50 users each trigger 10,000 runs a month. On MAU pricing that account is free. In compute it is not.
That gap is why the metering module exists. If your product charges per run or per API call, the meter has to be the same system that enforces the quota and bills the overage. The shape of that is in charging per API call in Next.js, and it is one call. Wiring a separate metering vendor to a separate billing vendor to a separate auth vendor is where the weeks go.
Where Kinde wins
Where Kinde wins, and none of it is small.
Enterprise SSO. Kinde ships SAML and enterprise connections. We do not. If an enterprise buyer has SSO on their security review, this comparison is already over and Kinde wins it. One connection is included even on Free, and Plus makes them unlimited.
Maturity and funding. Kinde is a funded company with a larger team and more production mileage than we have. If vendor risk is high on your list, that is a real consideration and you should weigh it honestly.
Focus. Auth is Kinde's product, not one module out of 20. Breadth costs depth, and on any single module that is a price we pay and they do not.
How to actually decide
Make a list of the systems you expect to need in the next twelve months. Not the ones you want. The ones a customer will make you build.
If that list is "auth, and maybe subscriptions", Kinde is the better tool and the cheaper one: $25 against $49 before you have a single user. If the list runs to workspaces, roles, metered billing, quota enforcement and event-driven workflows, you are choosing between one instance and four vendors, and the integration cost of the four is the number nobody puts on the comparison page. We added up one version of that stack in the real monthly cost of Clerk plus Stripe plus Lago plus Knock. And if there is no codebase in that list at all - if the plan is a page builder like Webflow rather than a repo - neither Kinde nor BuildBase is the right comparison; see Outseta vs BuildBase instead.
Whichever way that goes, re-check both sets of numbers on the day you commit. Ours are at /pricing.