How ShiftControl Uses PropelAuth to Empower Small Businesses & Startups
About ShiftControl
ShiftControl gives startups and growing businesses the tools to run Google Workspace and their SaaS stack like a pro—securely, efficiently, and without unnecessary complexity. The platform makes it easy to manage employee access, SaaS security, and costs in sync with your HR system, so your IT setup works seamlessly from day one.
The Authentication Challenge
As ShiftControl prepared to launch its product, the team had very specific needs around authentication infrastructure:
- Multi-tenant support to handle multiple customer orgs
- Customizable RBAC to support real-world business logic
- SSO and SCIM support from day one
- Rust and React SDKs to match their tech stack
- Startup-friendly pricing that didn’t penalize growth
"PropelAuth fit the bill, they had everything we needed including social auth, SSO, SCIM, and it was a great fit."
-Dan Gericke, ShiftControl Co-Founder
Why Not Build In-House?
This wasn’t the founder’s first encounter with authentication. As the former CTO of ExpressVPN, he’d led the development of a custom-built auth system used by millions. And while that made sense at scale, it also came with serious tradeoffs.
With years of cybersecurity experience, he knew exactly what was needed — and exactly what to avoid. For ShiftControl, choosing a modern, flexible auth platform was the obvious move.
Evaluating Options
ShiftControl considered a variety of solutions, including both SaaS and self-hosted options. They found that most SaaS options came with too large of a price tag, and going with a self-hosted option would require more overhead than they wanted to take on at their early stage.
They chose PropelAuth for its balance of features, usability, and flexibility — including out-of-the-box support for SSO, SCIM, impersonation, and multi-org architecture.
Implementation Experience
ShiftControl found that implementation was fairly easy. As one of the earliest adopters of the Rust SDK, they submitted feedback (and even direct PRS!) and found the PropelAuth team responsive.
Originally, their plan was to use the PropelAuth hosted UIs. However, after seeing how simple it was to build custom pages via the PropelAuth APIs, they decided to build their pages from scratch, giving them complete control over their styling to ensure it would always match their brand.
More About ShiftControl
ShiftControl helps small and growing businesses get enterprise-level control over their IT stack—without the enterprise baggage. The platform centralizes employee access, app provisioning, identity protection, and SaaS cost management, all in sync with Google Workspace and the HR system.
Built by tech veterans who scaled ExpressVPN, ShiftControl equips IT, HR, and Finance teams with proven best-practice setups for managing people, apps, and security across the business.
- For founders and operations teams, that means onboarding and offboarding employees in minutes, staying compliant, and avoiding security gaps.
- For IT, it means delaying the need for a full department while still running a world-class setup.
- For finance, it means finally getting clear, actionable visibility on SaaS spend.
Our mission is to help teams put IT and security best practices into action, securely, efficiently and cost-consciously, while keeping agility at the core.
What’s Next
ShiftControl continues to expand its platform capabilities to give small teams even greater control over their SaaS environment:
- SaaS spend intelligence dashboard — recently released, providing full visibility into SaaS spend by tool, team, department, and user. It helps spot high-cost areas, optimize spending, and stay ahead of upcoming contract renewals.
- OAuth, security, and compliance dashboard — coming soon to simplify monitoring, track which external apps have access to your data, and help meet standards like SOC 2 and ISO 27001.
- Ongoing improvements to RBAC, SCIM, and multi-tenant capabilities to support growing customer needs.
"PropelAuth makes it really easy for us to push out [new permissions]."
-Dan Gericke, ShiftControl Co-Founder
To learn more about how ShiftControl can help you simplify user management, employee onboarding and offboarding, check out their website.
To learn more about how PropelAuth can help you launch and grow your startup, check out our website.
