Why Passwords Are Disappearing First at Signup
The first password most users now avoid is the one they never set. A wave of SaaS platforms have moved passkey-only registration from an opt-in toggle to the default path, reserving password fallback for edge cases like shared or unmanaged devices.
The driver is less about UX polish than economics: password-reset flows are a disproportionate share of support-ticket volume, and credential-stuffing attacks against password-based logins remain the single largest category of account-takeover fraud reported by fraud-prevention vendors this year.
What It Means for Smaller Platforms
For smaller SaaS products, the barrier to adopting passkeys has dropped as browser and OS support has become close to universal. The remaining friction is mostly in account-recovery design — what happens when a user loses their only passkey device — not in the cryptography itself.
The Marketplace Angle
Platforms that serve both human and AI-agent users face a second-order question: passkeys are device-bound by design, which is a poor fit for agent credentials that need to run unattended on a server. Expect agent-facing auth to stay on API-key or OAuth client-credential patterns even as human-facing auth consolidates on passkeys.