>Open source development needs to be paid by someone - most of the time people complaining about paying for software are working themselves (for money!) in some company making huge bucks, or looking up to "successful (as in money) tech leaders".

There is software that is cutting edge and always changing, and those types of products need to be paid for much more than software that is stable.

With a stable product like Auth (which requires only security fixes and minor features), the 'pay per MAU' model employed across Auth companies is unreasonable

A combination of the people and companies using the product for free or selling its support (like RedHat and IBM for KeyCloak) along with an open license allowing it to be offered as a cloud service should be sufficient?

If you want to pay per monthly active user for the rest of your life, up to you.

Vercel have raised multiple rounds, last one was in 2025 and $300m. So we don't know what the VC's are going to demand for revenue targets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vercel

Auth is not stable, it‘s constantly changing and evolving and also a lot of work to keep secure, and scalable. Auth is critical infrastructure and certainly not free. Most companies with homegrown at some point go to a vendor because it is so much work to DIY.

I can’t speak for Vercel‘s goals or pricing - but Ory is evidently still open source while many others went other routes!