as a potential client, they were also night and day different. I had great sales conversations with Auth0, and they had so many easy to follow examples, tutorials, etc. Very helpful engineers on the call, who asked questions about our environments, etc.

A sales call with Okta just left me feeling dirty. It felt a lot like my sales calls when I was an Oracle customer. All about how many products they could push on us, no good technical explanations, and of course, huge pressure to 'sign this contract before the end of the month to get this great price'.

I wanted to go with Auth0, but then they got aquired, and we just said hell no.

Auth0 wasn't perfect (I would've like fewer pages), but it was pretty damn good. I learned a lot there and had one of the best managers of my career there. I also was the only employee in my country for several years and still felt very included. It was telling that I was able to chat with Eugenio myself even as a lowly IC. Okta's main claim to fame seemed to be a great sales team, though your explanation sounds like that wasn't great either.