Disclosure: I work for a competitor of Cognito, FusionAuth.

I agree, the author is totally confused.

Lite is equivalent was available before, and there's been a lot of improvements to essentials and plus (passkeys, more customization options). It is a bit weird that you have to be in the Plus plan to export user activity logs, but pricing is difficult. Depending on the number of users you had, lite can cost quite a bit more (5x for 60k users).

The simple pricing, which was one of the key benefits of Cognito, has become more complex. I put together a spreadsheet to show the price changes here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Nm5BUOjFlqqvaeDTERJm...

It's pretty clear that while there are increased features, if all you need is login, the pricing has increased significantly if you are above 10k MAU. If you are under 10k users, it's a wash, of course.

This spreadsheet ignores quota increase, SAML users, and M2M tokens, which are all charged separately.

However, you can see the plus tier, which includes what was previously "Advanced security features" has gotten significantly cheaper (pricing for that feature sourced from https://medium.com/@demandapi/aws-cognito-advantages-pricing... ). So bravo to them for lowering that.

There's also complexity in switching tiers, since if you switch from Plus to Lite in the middle of the month, you'll be charged Plus for all users who logged in before the switch and Lite for all after. That's incidental, but still added complexity.

And, as a sibling comment notes, there's legacy pricing for anyone who has a user pool with at least 1 MAU in the last 12 months. This legacy pricing lasts until Nov 30, 2025, which gives folks a chance to migrate or adjust business models.