Earlier this month Okta announced it was buying Auth0, an all-stock deal valued at something north of six billion dollars. I read it the way I read most of these: first the headline, then the quiet question of what happens to the thing I actually use.
I lean on Auth0 for a couple of side projects. Nothing critical, but enough that an OIDC flow I never have to think about is a flow I'd rather keep not thinking about. The official line is the usual reassurance: both products continue, nothing changes, business as usual. And maybe that's true for a good while. Okta and Auth0 weren't really competing for the same developer, so there's a plausible story where both survive.
But I've watched enough acquisitions to know the free tier is where the squeeze eventually lands. Not tomorrow, not this year necessarily, but the generous limits that made Auth0 easy to adopt are exactly the sort of thing that gets "rationalised" once the spreadsheet people are in the room.
So I'm not migrating in a panic. I am, quietly, making sure I could. My auth is behind a thin interface, the user data is exportable, and I know roughly what self-hosting Keycloak would cost me in evenings. That's the whole lesson, really: like the tool, depend on it, but always know the exit.