Planka deleted my logins: the SSO tax and the open-core rug-pull
If you run the self-hosted Kanban tool Planka with single sign-on, an update this month may have locked you out of your own board. Version 2.2.0 moved SSO from the free Community edition into paid Pro, and the upgrade deactivated every SSO-only account in the process. It's a small story about a niche tool, and also a clean illustration of a risk every self-hoster carries: the software you depend on can change the deal on you between one docker pull and the next.
What changed
Planka 2.2.0 (released 9 August 2026) removed OIDC/SSO from the free Community edition and put it behind the paid Pro tier. The part that turned a pricing change into an access incident is in the release notes, verbatim: "After updating, all SSO-based users are deactivated, because they no longer have a password login." SSO-only accounts have no password to fall back on, so upgrading silently locks them out; recovery means an admin setting a password for each affected user. The notes even warn that if your only admin is SSO-based, you'll lock yourself out entirely unless you create a password admin first.
To be fair to the maintainers — and I want to be — the same release added free TOTP two-factor auth, auto-logout, and trusted devices. Password login stays free. It's federated identity specifically that moved.
The maintainers have a real case
The knee-jerk reaction is "SSO tax!" and there's a whole project (sso.tax) documenting vendors who gate basic security behind a 400% enterprise upsell. But Planka's reasoning, from their own issue tracker, is more sympathetic than the outrage allows: SSO was, in their words, "by far the feature that costs us the most support" — over 100 setup requests a month — and they always intended it as an enterprise feature that "never fit" in Community. Charging enterprises for enterprise identity management is a legitimate way to fund a project, and they kept actual account security (password + 2FA) free.
So the fair criticism isn't "how dare you charge for SSO." It's the execution: shipping an upgrade that deactivates existing users with no automatic password-migration path. That's the difference between a pricing decision and an outage.
The feature moving to paid is a business decision you can disagree with. The upgrade silently deactivating your logins is a broken deploy. Only one of those is actually the maintainer's fault.
The pattern, which is the real story
Planka is one instance of something a solo self-hoster should have a mental model for: open-core tightening. Features migrate from the free tier to paid (Mattermost gates SAML/LDAP behind Enterprise); or whole projects relicense (Terraform to BSL, which spawned OpenTofu; Redis to SSPL, which spawned Valkey; Elastic; Sentry). The mechanics differ — feature-gating versus relicensing — but the lived experience is the same: the thing you built on quietly stops being the thing you thought you had. This is the flip side of the bus-factor risk I wrote about with File Browser and Jellyfin. There, the danger was the maintainer walking away. Here, it's the maintainer needing to get paid. Both are the cost of building on software you don't control, and both are survivable if you see them coming.
What to actually do
Not paranoia — just hygiene:
- Pin your image tags. Never blind
:lateston anything that holds state or auth. This exact update deactivated accounts; an untested auto-pull could have done it to you in your sleep. - Read the release notes before upgrading, especially the "breaking changes" section. Thirty seconds would have surfaced the SSO deactivation.
- Keep a break-glass admin — a plain password admin account that doesn't depend on SSO or any one identity provider. The maintainers recommend this themselves, and it's good practice regardless.
- Do a quick open-core audit of your stack: which features you rely on could plausibly move behind a paywall, and what your exit looks like if they do.
Honestly, as a solo operator you probably don't need federated SSO at all — a password and the now-free 2FA is fine. So for most of us the Planka change costs nothing but a reminder. That reminder is the value: the software on your box is maintained by people who have to make a living, and the terms can change on any pull. Pin, read the notes, keep a way back in.