How to build an authenticated webservice without requiring full licenses for each user?

Question

I'm in the process of re-architecting an old webservice. To keep licensing costs down the webservice is exposed publicly through Sites and a custom authentication and security model was baked into it.

I'd like to get the authentication and security model pieces out of the webservice and instead make use of Salesforce's out of the box authentication and security model. I know I can do this with a full salesforce license for each user, but due to the very low volume of requests expected per user this isn't feasible cost wise. Is there anyway to leverage other license types, i.e. high-volume customer portal users or authenticated sites users, to build an authenticated webservice?

Answer 1

Absolutely. In order to use the standard security model, the cheapest way I know of is to use Sites, backed by Authenticated Website user licenses (which I believe replaced the old high-volume customer portal term). The chunk size I think starts around something like 5,000 users so may not be suitable for very small deployments.

That licensing option (at least the last time I got a quote, maybe 1 year ago) also includes an option to license by number of unique logins per month rather than number of named users. That option carries a cap that your total user count can't be more than something like 5x or 10x your monthly unique logins; i.e. if you buy 20k logins per month, you also can't have more than 100k User records.

Don't know exact pricing these days, but it probably starts on the order of single to low-double digit thousands per year.