6 free alternatives to Permit.io

Logto's free plan gives you up to 50,000 monthly active users, 50,000 tokens per month, 3 applications, 1 machine-to-machine app, 3 social connectors, 1 custom domain, 1 webhook, and audit logs with user management. It is free to start and no card is required. The main advantage over Permit.io is room for much larger user volume if your authorization setup is tied to a broader identity layer. It falls short on authorization depth, since Permit.io's free tier is built around many authorization models, unlimited queries, more policy tooling, and unlimited PDP instances. Switch here if your immediate bottleneck is user scale and you want auth plus identity in one hosted product.

• Beats Permit.io: 50,000 monthly active users
• Falls short: Less authorization-model depth and policy-management breadth
• Who should switch: Switch if your app needs a hosted identity layer with authorization attached, and your main constraint is user volume rather than policy complexity.

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Cerbos Hub's free Proof of Concept tier includes 1 workspace, 2 developers, 2 Playgrounds, 2 simultaneous PDPs, up to 5 custom tenants, 5 policy builds per week, 1 week of unified audit logs, Synapse enrichment and integrations, in-browser or serverless authorization, managed CI/CD pipeline, and community support. It is designed for policy testing and controlled rollout. Compared with Permit.io, it offers a more policy-centric workflow for teams already using Cerbos-style authorization, but it has much tighter caps on teams, tenants, and audit retention. It is the better switch if you want to validate policy design in a smaller, more structured setup.

• Beats Permit.io: Managed policy workflow with Playgrounds and CI/CD for Cerbos policies
• Falls short: Much lower tenant, team, and audit-log limits
• Who should switch: Switch if you are already on Cerbos or want a managed policy control plane for a small authorization proof of concept.

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PropelAuth's free plan includes 10,000 monthly active users, unlimited organizations, unlimited waitlist users, a custom domain, 2FA, RBAC, and customizable UIs. No card is required. Its free tier is attractive when tenant or organization count matters more than fine-grained policy modeling. It beats Permit.io on organization capacity because Permit.io's free tier is capped at 20 tenants, while PropelAuth leaves organizations unlimited. It falls short on authorization modeling breadth, because Permit.io is built for multiple authorization models, unlimited queries, and richer policy structure. Choose this when your app is B2B and you need a broad auth layer with plenty of room for organizations.

• Beats Permit.io: Unlimited organizations
• Falls short: Less support for multiple authorization models and policy tooling
• Who should switch: Switch if tenant count is your main blocker and you want auth features wrapped around B2B organization management.

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Scalekit's free plan includes 5,000 tool calls per month, unlimited connected accounts for user-authorized connections, access to 500+ pre-built connectors, bring-your-own-credentials support, and community plus email support. No card is required. It is the closest fit for AI-agent or integration-heavy workflows where connection breadth matters more than authorization policy modeling. It beats Permit.io on connected-account scale and connector coverage, while Permit.io is stronger for core authorization concepts like roles, tenants, conditions, and PDP-based policy enforcement. Switch if your free-tier pressure comes from tool orchestration or agent integrations rather than classic authorization.

• Beats Permit.io: 500+ pre-built connectors with unlimited connected accounts
• Falls short: Less suited to traditional authorization policy management
• Who should switch: Switch if you are building AI agents or integration-heavy workflows and need orchestration more than policy governance.

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Builder.io's free tier includes up to 5 users per space, GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket connections, public previews, an admin-only role, usage metrics, and onboarding plus deployed engineering support. No card is required. It is not a direct authorization platform, but it can be a better free choice when your real need is collaborative app-building and content workflows rather than policy enforcement. It beats Permit.io on editor-style collaboration and repository connections, while falling far short on authorization features like roles, tenants, policy queries, and PDP deployment. Use it only if your team is moving away from policy management toward UI and web app production.

• Beats Permit.io: Collaborative app-building workflows with repository integrations
• Falls short: Not an authorization policy platform
• Who should switch: Switch if your project is really about building and shipping web experiences, not managing authorization policies.

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Filestack's free trial tier opens the Start plan at $69 per month and includes 75 GB bandwidth, 20,000 uploads, 50,000 transformations, 50 GB storage, up to 5 team members, a 1 GB max file size, one workflow, unlimited tasks and executions, webhooks, CDN delivery, and storage provider integrations. No card is required. It is useful when your bottleneck is file handling, media processing, or upload infrastructure. It beats Permit.io on storage, transfer, and content-processing quotas, but it is not meant for authorization policy management at all. Pick it if your application needs file workflows more than access-control logic.

• Beats Permit.io: High bandwidth, uploads, transformations, and storage for file workflows
• Falls short: Not an authorization product
• Who should switch: Switch if you need file upload and media processing infrastructure, not policy enforcement.

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