[apatters]

The reason I'm still a bit skeptical about password-less authentication is because the cost savings opportunity is enormous. So enormous that it would be easy to lose sight of everything else.

About a third of Yahoo Japan's customer support requests where password inquiries -- the FIDO Alliance estimates the cost of a single password reset inquiry at $70.

It's hard to look at those numbers as a manager with bottom line responsibility and not want to go full password-less.

But as a startup your main interest should usually be growth, cost reduction is best addressed after you hit a critical mass.

It feels like the jury is still out on whether password-less converts better -- this article says it does, but doesn't go into depth. Anecdotally it seems to frustrate a lot of people (me included).

Password-less may be great, I just know that in enterprise the support cost savings are going to distort or render all other arguments moot. We have a long history of ideas that have come out of FAANG, worked well for them, and been cargo-culted into the rest of the world where they promptly turned out to be a bad choice.

[adhesive_wombat]

You can reduce password inquiries too by losing all your customers. It would be very Yahoo of them to lose thousands of customers and then promote the culprit because they reported that password request metrics got a lot better!

Not that I think that happened, but if it had to be any company that did that, they're a candidate.