I don't understand why AWS doesn't put more effort into Cognito without messing with pricing. It is such an effective loss-leader. If you're someone who will go past the free tiers for Cognito, the rest of your AWS spend will almost certainly be a lot more. Take advantage of that and stop measuring the Cognito team's success by their revenue and profitability. Usage alone should be the goal. You're still billed for all the lambda processing that happens on various Cognito hooks. You're still billed for all the API requests these Cognito users make.

The auth service space is so strange. Almost every vendor is ridiculously expensive for any B2C use-case. Cognito, with its free tier of 50k MAU, was one of the few relatively cheap options. Even the "open source core" offerings in the space are crazy if you use their hosted version. And their self-hosted versions inevitably end up requiring you to run Postgres, Redis cluster, a background job running task, etc. If you're not getting Cognito for cheap, you're better off just using libraries to roll your own auth service/module instead of going for any off the shelf auth SaaS or self-hosted solution.

> I don't understand why AWS doesn't put more effort into Cognito without messing with pricing. It is such an effective loss-leader

AWS team\org business priorities, like P&L computation, changed pretty drastically in 2022-23.

Historically there were a lot of services built, run, and measured on the idea of solving customers diverse needs and making AWS a better place to run your business. This isnt a “loss leader” per se, but 1) profitability may not be your highest business prioirty 2) customers & shareholders valued growth & diversity of offerings above almost everything else 3) business units would set forward looking pricing based on marginal rates 2-3 years out under better utilization models 4) services would not-uncommonoly use “attribution” or “flow through” revenue models for P&L. Eg autoscaling doesnt have a meaningfully price, but it drives (hypothetically) 3% of EC2 instance hours. Autoscaling than books a portion of the 3% of instance hour revenue to their profit center. Cognito (or Route 53 or SSM where I worked) would use this sort of P&L model.

Circa 2022 AMZn shareholders, amazon execs, and the market more broadly turned to Revenue and Profit as the goal, no longer growth per se. This drastically changed a lot of internal business models. No more “free rides”, book revenue, define and execute a plan to be a many million dollar direct revenue business, the old “growth and better together” story wasnt selling.

And i dont think thats a bad thing per se, as a shareholder. I appreciate the focus on proving your value via pricing and usage. But there will be some sad “abandonware” and service shutdowns over the next few years.