Investment and Benefits to Gradually Adopt Passkeys

When considering your passkey strategy, you should be aware of the costs and benefits of passkey implementation. There is an upfront investment to support passkeys. After initial launch you will have ongoing costs, savings, and benefits for your users and your organization.

note

The costs discussed in this section are estimates, meant to provide you with a direction you can adapt to your own needs. It is common for human resource and technology costs associated with passkeys to be similar if you build the technology for passkeys in-house or purchase the technology from a solutions provider. This decision is often determined by your overall corporate policy to either build or buy new technologies.

Cost of technology acquisition approaches

There are a range of passkey technology acquisition approaches, such as:

• Build the technology for passkeys in-house
• Purchase the technology from a solutions provider
• Implement technologies that are already accounted for as sunk costs
• Use open source tools and libraries initially and then engage a solutions provider for the full implementation

While the first two approaches incur similar costs, the third considers a sunk cost. As an example, the third approach is possible if your organization currently pays for and uses a Consumer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) system that offers passkey functionality without additional licensing fees. It might lower costs to use the CIAM system for passkeys if your full range of business requirements are also accounted for by the CIAM provider.

tip

To locate a solutions provider, visit the FIDO Certified Showcase or search the internet for passkey solution provider.

Three phases of all passkey programs

1. Launch is the time leading up to the launch of passkey availability.
2. Reaching the business goal is the time it takes after launch to achieve your business goal.
3. Ongoing use starts after you have reached your business goal.

Costs for Launch and Reaching the Business Goal

For the gradual roll-out strategy, one product manager and one engineer typically work full-time on the project until initial launch. It is common for two additional resources dedicate part of their time until initial launch.

tip

Organizations know the average fully loaded costs per employee per year. This is unique for each organization and each department. Multiply the total number of employee years by your average cost per employee per year to arrive at a rough estimate of human resources needed to implement this roll-out strategy.

(Employee years) x (average fully loaded cost per employee) = estimated cost of human resources

People	Volume	Months	Employee years
2	Full-time	6	1
1	Part-time	6	0.5
1	Part-time	4	0.15

Ongoing costs

After initial launch and one month dedicated to data gathering and customer support, your organization should work on passkeys as part of the code base for your service and treat passkeys like any other area of the service. There is no need for a team to continue to dedicate their time to passkeys. Product managers and leadership should determine the priority of enhancements to your code base.

Ongoing technology costs can vary based on whether you plan to use a vendor that provides APIs or a SaaS solution.

If you plan to use a vendor who provides APIs or a SaaS solution:

Technology	Proportional costs
FIDO Certified Servers	10%
Vendor providing a SaaS solution	90%

If you do not use a vendor:

Technology	Proportional costs
FIDO Certified Servers	30%
Compute / Storage / Transfer	70%

Helper Download File

⤓ Download the Excel file
passkey-worksheet-authentication-method-inventory-costs-and-user-experience-analysis.xlsx

This sample Excel worksheet contains an authentication inventory, cost analysis, and user experience analysis. There are two tabs in the worksheet. One contains sample data and the other tab is blank. Fill in your own data to the blank tab.

Ongoing benefits

The benefits of passkey implementation are directly proportional to the number of people who use them.

You will see the following benefits as passkey use increases:

• Improvements for the end user experience
  • Higher sign-in success rates
  • Faster time to sign in
• Business improvements
  • Reductions in phishing, credential stuffing, and attack surface
  • Lower rate of cart abandonment
  • Reduction in need for password resets during account recovery
  • Decrease in need for customer support
  • Increase in customer loyalty and retention
• Lower costs associated with:
  • monitoring and defending malicious actors in real-time
  • continuous hardening of traditional authentication solutions
  • account reset due to forgot password and account lockout
• Lower service costs for SMS text messages associated with authentication
• Fewer customers drop off in critical conversion path

tip

Compare the costs and benefits of passkeys with other authentication methods.