Aserto built a developer authorization platform on Open Policy Agent with policy-as-code and fine-grained permissions. See what it offered and its current…
Aserto was a Redmond, Washington-based startup founded in 2020 by developer-tools veterans Omri Gazitt and Gert Drapers, who set out to build a modern authorization platform for the age of SaaS and cloud applications.
The company raised a $5.1 million seed round in 2021 led by Costanoa Ventures, with backing from notable angel investors from Snowflake, Netlify, and GitHub, and built a platform that let developers add fine-grained, policy-based permissions to their applications.
In 2025 the founders announced they were shutting down Aserto's commercial SaaS control plane and winding down the company, citing an unsustainable business model, while committing that the open-source Topaz authorizer at the heart of the product would continue to be maintained.
Aserto supported multiple authorization models in a single platform, including role-based (RBAC), attribute-based (ABAC), policy-based (PBAC), and relationship-based (ReBAC) access control, so teams did not need separate tools for each model.
Its authorization decisions were powered by Topaz, an open-source authorizer built on Open Policy Agent, giving developers a battle-tested policy engine rather than a proprietary black box.
The platform offered policy-as-code workflows integrated with GitHub and GitLab, SDKs for common languages, identity provider integrations such as Auth0, Okta, and Azure AD, and decision logging for auditing access decisions.
Historically, Aserto offered a free Starter tier for personal projects and evaluation, an Essentials tier at $0.20 per user per month, and custom-quoted Pro and Enterprise tiers for larger organizations.
As of 2025, Aserto no longer sells any commercial plans: the company wound down its hosted SaaS and paid support offerings entirely.
The only way to use Aserto's technology today is to self-host the open-source Topaz authorizer, which remains free and community-maintained at topaz.sh.
Aserto was a developer-focused authorization platform that let applications enforce fine-grained permissions using policy-as-code, built on Open Policy Agent.
The commercial company and its hosted SaaS shut down by May 31, 2025. Its open-source Topaz authorizer remains available and maintained.
The founders announced in 2025 that they were winding down Aserto as a commercial entity because the hybrid SaaS model was not economically sustainable.
Topaz is Aserto's open-source authorizer built on Open Policy Agent. It continues to be developed and maintained independently at topaz.sh.
Aserto historically offered a free Starter tier for personal projects, alongside paid Essentials, Pro, and Enterprise tiers, before all commercial plans were discontinued.
Aserto was founded in 2020 by Omri Gazitt and Gert Drapers, both experienced developer-tools executives.
The commercial Aserto product is discontinued, but its core Topaz authorizer remains open source under community maintenance.