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How Wristband made multi-tenant auth seamless

A conversation with David Chu, CTO and Co-founder of Wristband

300+
Organisation tenants
25+
Years of auth experience
0
Infrastructure maintenance

About Wristband

Like many great tools, Wristband was born from firsthand experience with a problem. Before co-founding Wristband, David Chu spent years building complex authentication systems, including leading AppDynamics' Business IQ platform through their Cisco acquisition. He saw how companies struggled with B2B authentication - constantly reinventing the wheel and burning through resources just to provide basic features like SSO and custom branding. Together with Jim Verducci and Bryan Hsiao, they set out to build something better.

Today, Wristband helps companies create customized authentication experiences for their enterprise customers. Their platform handles all the complex pieces - SSO integration, custom branding, authentication policies - letting companies focus on their core products instead of wrestling with auth systems. What makes them unique is their focus on multi-tenant authentication, where each customer gets their own branded login experience without the traditional enterprise pricing overhead.

The Challenge

For the wildcard case, there's not really much out there on how to do that. We knew we needed to build it, but we didn't know how to do it. Originally I was trying to do it in-house and then I was like, oh God, this is going to be a pain.

David Chu, CTO and Co-founder of WristbandDavid Chu, CTO and Co-founder of Wristband
  • Needed wildcard custom domain support for tenant-specific auth pages
  • Cloudflare's enterprise pricing was prohibitively expensive at $3,000/month
  • Building in-house solution would require significant engineering resources
  • Required scalable solution that wouldn't distract from core product development

The Solution

SaaS Custom Domains provided Wristband with a streamlined solution that aligned perfectly with their needs:

  • Support for wildcard domains enabling tenant-specific subdomains
  • Simple API that made integration straightforward
  • Cost-effective alternative to enterprise solutions
  • Zero maintenance overhead for custom domain infrastructure

Key Results

Scalable Growth

Successfully scaled to support over 300 organisation tenants with custom authentication pages

Cost Efficiency

Achieved enterprise-grade domain management at a fraction of alternative solutions' cost

Development Focus

Engineering team stayed focused on core authentication features instead of domain infrastructure

Enhanced UX

Provided seamless white-labeled authentication experience for enterprise customers

Final Thoughts

Your customer support is top-notch. I've never interacted with customer support where they were willing to just build features for us, especially since we're a small company. You're solving a really cool problem that probably affects a lot of people.

David Chu, CTO and Co-founder of WristbandDavid Chu, CTO and Co-founder of Wristband
David
David

Could you tell me about Wristband and what your platform does?

11:24 AM

Wristband is an authentication platform, but we specialize in multi-tenant authentication. We provide authentication solutions to companies that sell to other organizations.

Each of their customers has their own authentication requirements. It's not like a universal authentication page - it's specialized authentication pages for each of their enterprise-level customers.

11:25 AM

What challenges were you facing with custom domains before using our service?

11:26 AM

We looked at Cloudflare but that was going to be ridiculously expensive - about $3,000 a month minimum. Being a bootstrap startup, we couldn't afford that just for custom domains.

Building it ourselves would have been a huge undertaking, especially for wildcard domains. There wasn't much documentation out there on how to implement that properly.

11:28 AM

How did our solution help address these challenges?

11:29 AM

You were the only ones who could support our wildcard domain use case at an actually affordable price for a startup. That was a huge relief.

The integration was straightforward, and your support in implementing the wildcard functionality was exceptional. It just works without us having to think about it, which is exactly what we needed.

11:31 AM
Message

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