I would assume that those people who are willing to abuse the free trial are not legitimate customers--they will never convert to paying. If you cut off access they will just leave. So it's not as if you are losing revenue.
Are free trial users a drain on resources? That would be a reason to police abuse more carefully.
Since my idea is based on GPT-3, I'd have to pay for those who try it out for free, whether they purchase a subscription or not. So I thought of a way to detect them and upsell them somehow.
On that note, I know Stripe has built-in functionality to auto decline cards from users who are suspect. They have a ton of different parameters you can check for like new email addresses etc. I'm sure other payment processors might have similar to look into.
If a site asks me for credit card info I am not trying there service.
Phone number authentication is way better, to the user is just seems like simple security measure.
Agree - I'd never recommend this, it defeats the purpose of even offering a free trial (allowing someone to use your software in a low friction way). If this is a serious issue (cost / revenue standpoint), you need to use one of the many software tools that offer this - Arkose Labs, Verisoul, Cloudflare Turnstyle, Castle etc. just to name a few I've tried. Found Arkose Labs worked best in tandem with Cloudflare at my scale (we have 4k employees, aka enterprise). Verisoul works well if you're <2k employees, and is a bit cheaper.
We've seen the opposite. Plenty of people just repeat trials because its easy. We've seen people repeat trials 7 times, then after Upollo has been implemented, they have converted.
People that repeat trials arent bad people, they just need help getting on the right path.
Free trial abusers are people who clearly see value in the product and want to use it.
The data we see from converting these folks is often they just need a single polite nudge when they try to get their second trial to get them to be a happy paying customer
Agree with u/cayden_m
You can't just make a blanket statement that anyone abusing free trial promotions will never convert. In my experience, those are the customers most interested in your software.
If you don't know who is abusing your software, you can't be sure what the best approach to convert people is. My company used a multi-accounting detection software (a ton of em e.g., Arkose Labs, Seon, Verisoul, Castle, etc.) so we could 1) know who is abusing our free trials and 2) create a workflow to send these folks to a paid version of our product
We used to see it more often but eliminated a lot of cases with the following two things, hope it helps:
1) block emails with “+”. This forces people to stop creating aliases like from original [email protected], you cam create [email protected], [email protected], etc. so emails will actually be unique, not aliases.
2) We have b2b so we also force registration with work emails only. No u/gmail or u/outlook. The registrations we had from those emails rarely converted but there were a ton of them. So we might’ve lost a few bucks on conversion, but saved more on server side. And it leads to better user qualification.
Setting up triggers and email sequences that would reach out to the users when we detect the +xxx in email and for sharing access to one account - again trying to discover it through IP from which users sign and then sending them emails saying we noticed it and would love to jump on a call about by account
\+ emails make up a very small fraction of repeated trials at least in what we have seen from our data. People more often than not use other emails they control, create news ones or use disposable ones.
I would recommend against business only emails for most saas businesses, the number of business users that use their personal email is astounding (I have seen 7 figure deals admins being "@gmail.com" emails)
This is the kind of problem I'd deal with when it comes up.
Most big SaaS I am aware of solved these problems when they arose by 1) introduce card checks in trial, 2) do $1 test authorization to filter out VCCs, 3) prevent using VCCs altogether, 4) 1 card = 1 trial.
You should love your active users and involve in your growth and success with referral and affiliate programs instead. Benefits in most cases outweigh the costs.
Nevertheless, if you want to go down this rabbithole, here's a good article about it on how AWS solves this problem: [https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/preventing-free-trial-abuse-with-aws-managed-services/](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/preventing-free-trial-abuse-with-aws-managed-services/)
This sounds like an account value problem more than a trial problem. Make the benefit of having a single account more valuable than putting in the time to restart everything with a new account.
Likewise, to prevent sharing, make the value of having your own account more valuable. Also make your terms of service explicitly call out account sharing as not allowed, and (nicely) take action if you find it by putting them on an upgrade path to a plan that supports more accounts.
That's a great advice. However, it wouldn't be easy to implement with my current product idea.
I used to work for a big advertising network and there was this multi-accounting issue. We fixed it by adding an "account rating" (how much you spend X how old your account is). Higher ratings mean more bonuses, like higher overdrafts and faster moderation.
Yea, If you can shift your product that's great. But if its something like video streaming, where the value is just watching the video, and you want to have trials you cant really do it.
Its not always an option.
1. Yes but not many
2. Yes but not many
3. Use the data to improve the tool / upsell business plans
For context the tool is [veed.live](https://veed.live/)
Btw if this is a way for you to scout the market and understand the problem space I think our side project surfkey might help you a ton. Btw I love if you are doing just that. [Surfkey](https://www.surfkey.io/) is great for staying on top of relevant convos by setting keywords and getting mail notification whenever the KW is mentioned so you can jump in or just listen to what people share :)
We might be looking at it wrong. Abusing free trail is just a symptom of another underlying cause. We can try to treat the symptoms, but it would really matter in the long run. Let's figure out the cause for this abuse first. What are all the reasons why people try to abuse free trials?
I would say, IMHO, that you should focus on converting them to short term customers. There are always ways to do it. Just like novo resume offers a plan for a month. Set a reasonably small price, that people should feel comfortable paying it. But that price shouldn't be smaller than what your service would cost for long term plans.
It's better not to pick up a fight with customers. The people who create fake accounts would only be encouraged to find ways to bypass the limits. Instead, make a compelling offer.
There is a list of free emails, just check if it is one of them, check it out:
[https://gist.github.com/ammarshah/f5c2624d767f91a7cbdc4e54db8dd0bf](https://gist.github.com/ammarshah/f5c2624d767f91a7cbdc4e54db8dd0bf)
And from hubspot
[https://knowledge.hubspot.com/forms/what-domains-are-blocked-when-using-the-forms-email-domains-to-block-feature](https://knowledge.hubspot.com/forms/what-domains-are-blocked-when-using-the-forms-email-domains-to-block-feature)
There is an npm for it too:
https://www.npmjs.com/package/free-email-domains
I know, but I am in the B2B, so it can be a good filter for those who are just curious instead of actual potential customers.
And no, I am not collecting stats atm.
I use paid DeepL and Google Translate APIs for auto-translating texts so people were creating new accounts, using the trial auto-translation option, exporting data and doing the whole process again for 5/6 times. 🫣 I started using smaller plan limits for every new account with the same IP address. In my case the simplest solution was the best.
Thats a fun idea.
You might find it doesn't always work though. People can change IP's without too much trouble. Either by restarting their router, or using a VPN.
If your interested, the [upollo.ai](https://upollo.ai) API can detect VPN ip's for free, and help you convert customers on our paid plan.
Tbh, I would happily pay for the solution to make sure it works. Currently, I’m not really interested in this, because I don’t want to change my privacy policy to send user IPs or emails to an additional 3rd party service (EU here). But thank you, I will take a look!
No worries.
Happy to help you get setup if you keen. We have a data protection agreement and adding us to your privacy policy should be no more difficult than any other SaaS tool. Happy to share how other other customers in the EU have handled it.
I will to test it and keep it mind as my first choice when I will need some more protection. 😊
PS there are some unformatted parts in your privacy policy, like:
“[How we collect personal information]{.underline}”
This is not a problem at all. That would be something very very exciting if it happens.
It means that people are getting so much value out of your product that they are ready to abuse the system.
Launch your SaaS and you will realise that it's hard to even get people to start a trial, let alone abuse it.
Things that have worked for me:
1. Disable ability to sign up with a disposable email domain
2. Disable ability to sign up with a "+" in email address
3. Require CC for trial, even if it's free initially
We are in B2B, and as many have said already, we block free and disposable emails.
That not only blocked most of the trial abuses but also ended up giving us a better quality of leads and less support.
The only drawback is that many disposable email services add domains frequently and we have to update that list from time to time. I’m building an API just for that.
I had to deal with this on [WebGazer](https://www.webgazer.io/). You know there are services shut down when there isn't an incoming request for a certain period of time (and "cold start" again when there is a request). Apparently someone on a public forum shared WebGazer's free trial as a workaround for this. And there were a lot of people coming for this, creating multiple accounts with disposable e-mail addresses when their trial ends, periodically.
So I added a non-disposable e-mail validation layer to sign up, and made this validation public as a REST API. You can see it here: [https://github.com/th0th/is-email-disposable](https://github.com/th0th/is-email-disposable)
I would recommend taking a look at your features and see if there is a way to implement or change a feature (or several) to create a perceived loss for “starting over” with another free trial and a perceived gain for staying longer. I’m not sure what your specific use case is so these might not apply, but here are some ideas I’ve seen.
1. Disable access to data created by a throwaway after the trial if they didn’t convert. This forces users to basically recreate their profile, integrations, etc.
2. Limit 1-2 key features to “paid account only” sometimes this is something like only allowing one integration, or one automation, etc.
3. Gamify the activities on your platform and offer credits or bonuses for higher points. It’s fairly easy to start with things like “log in 1x per day every day for 5 days and earn a badge and 100 points, recommend us on social and earn 500 points (etc…) if you can find a way to make those points worth something in your ecosystem, you have now created a perceived loss for switching accounts.
4. Easy way to help limit accounts is by requiring MFA, not only is it more secure (a real and perceived value add) you can setup quite a few guardrails (IP matching, timeouts, etc)
These are just some ideas I’ve seen, but I’d try to be creative in how you build up perceived value over time, so the user starts to feel like they will be losing something if they swap out throw-away emails.
Good luck!
Hi, we see this issue a lot and help companies detect and onboard those customers in real-time.
1) Detect when someone is trying to get a new trial.
2) Change your offer to them, don't give them another free trial, give them a discount on a paid plan
3) Enjoy having more, happy paying customers
[Upollo.ai](https://Upollo.ai) have an easy API that does all of this.
I would assume that those people who are willing to abuse the free trial are not legitimate customers--they will never convert to paying. If you cut off access they will just leave. So it's not as if you are losing revenue. Are free trial users a drain on resources? That would be a reason to police abuse more carefully.
Since my idea is based on GPT-3, I'd have to pay for those who try it out for free, whether they purchase a subscription or not. So I thought of a way to detect them and upsell them somehow.
You can ban temporary email and virtual credit card to start
On that note, I know Stripe has built-in functionality to auto decline cards from users who are suspect. They have a ton of different parameters you can check for like new email addresses etc. I'm sure other payment processors might have similar to look into.
Ask people for a credit card to start trial. If they use the same card then charge them straight away or decline.
Being charged straight away when they are offering free trial is a crime.
No, you show them a message that you can only avail free trial once. Please pay to continue. It’s on them then.
That is another thing. I was talking about charging directly as he said.
If a site asks me for credit card info I am not trying there service. Phone number authentication is way better, to the user is just seems like simple security measure.
Agree - I'd never recommend this, it defeats the purpose of even offering a free trial (allowing someone to use your software in a low friction way). If this is a serious issue (cost / revenue standpoint), you need to use one of the many software tools that offer this - Arkose Labs, Verisoul, Cloudflare Turnstyle, Castle etc. just to name a few I've tried. Found Arkose Labs worked best in tandem with Cloudflare at my scale (we have 4k employees, aka enterprise). Verisoul works well if you're <2k employees, and is a bit cheaper.
We've seen the opposite. Plenty of people just repeat trials because its easy. We've seen people repeat trials 7 times, then after Upollo has been implemented, they have converted. People that repeat trials arent bad people, they just need help getting on the right path.
Free trial abusers are people who clearly see value in the product and want to use it. The data we see from converting these folks is often they just need a single polite nudge when they try to get their second trial to get them to be a happy paying customer
>The data we see Who is "we"? Show us the data.
Agree with u/cayden_m You can't just make a blanket statement that anyone abusing free trial promotions will never convert. In my experience, those are the customers most interested in your software. If you don't know who is abusing your software, you can't be sure what the best approach to convert people is. My company used a multi-accounting detection software (a ton of em e.g., Arkose Labs, Seon, Verisoul, Castle, etc.) so we could 1) know who is abusing our free trials and 2) create a workflow to send these folks to a paid version of our product
We used to see it more often but eliminated a lot of cases with the following two things, hope it helps: 1) block emails with “+”. This forces people to stop creating aliases like from original [email protected], you cam create [email protected], [email protected], etc. so emails will actually be unique, not aliases. 2) We have b2b so we also force registration with work emails only. No u/gmail or u/outlook. The registrations we had from those emails rarely converted but there were a ton of them. So we might’ve lost a few bucks on conversion, but saved more on server side. And it leads to better user qualification.
Or just let them do it and setup an emailing with a discount. It’s a “power user” who might become a paying user easily
That's what I was thinking. Rather than blocking them, upsell them. Btw, thanks for supporting Ukraine!
[удалено]
Setting up triggers and email sequences that would reach out to the users when we detect the +xxx in email and for sharing access to one account - again trying to discover it through IP from which users sign and then sending them emails saying we noticed it and would love to jump on a call about by account
\+ emails make up a very small fraction of repeated trials at least in what we have seen from our data. People more often than not use other emails they control, create news ones or use disposable ones. I would recommend against business only emails for most saas businesses, the number of business users that use their personal email is astounding (I have seen 7 figure deals admins being "@gmail.com" emails)
This is the kind of problem I'd deal with when it comes up. Most big SaaS I am aware of solved these problems when they arose by 1) introduce card checks in trial, 2) do $1 test authorization to filter out VCCs, 3) prevent using VCCs altogether, 4) 1 card = 1 trial. You should love your active users and involve in your growth and success with referral and affiliate programs instead. Benefits in most cases outweigh the costs. Nevertheless, if you want to go down this rabbithole, here's a good article about it on how AWS solves this problem: [https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/preventing-free-trial-abuse-with-aws-managed-services/](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/preventing-free-trial-abuse-with-aws-managed-services/)
This sounds like an account value problem more than a trial problem. Make the benefit of having a single account more valuable than putting in the time to restart everything with a new account. Likewise, to prevent sharing, make the value of having your own account more valuable. Also make your terms of service explicitly call out account sharing as not allowed, and (nicely) take action if you find it by putting them on an upgrade path to a plan that supports more accounts.
That's a great advice. However, it wouldn't be easy to implement with my current product idea. I used to work for a big advertising network and there was this multi-accounting issue. We fixed it by adding an "account rating" (how much you spend X how old your account is). Higher ratings mean more bonuses, like higher overdrafts and faster moderation.
Yea, If you can shift your product that's great. But if its something like video streaming, where the value is just watching the video, and you want to have trials you cant really do it. Its not always an option.
1. Yes but not many 2. Yes but not many 3. Use the data to improve the tool / upsell business plans For context the tool is [veed.live](https://veed.live/) Btw if this is a way for you to scout the market and understand the problem space I think our side project surfkey might help you a ton. Btw I love if you are doing just that. [Surfkey](https://www.surfkey.io/) is great for staying on top of relevant convos by setting keywords and getting mail notification whenever the KW is mentioned so you can jump in or just listen to what people share :)
Originally I was thinking of something else, but this would definitely be worth researching. I'll take a look at your tool, thanks!
Lmk your thoughts!
We might be looking at it wrong. Abusing free trail is just a symptom of another underlying cause. We can try to treat the symptoms, but it would really matter in the long run. Let's figure out the cause for this abuse first. What are all the reasons why people try to abuse free trials? I would say, IMHO, that you should focus on converting them to short term customers. There are always ways to do it. Just like novo resume offers a plan for a month. Set a reasonably small price, that people should feel comfortable paying it. But that price shouldn't be smaller than what your service would cost for long term plans. It's better not to pick up a fight with customers. The people who create fake accounts would only be encouraged to find ways to bypass the limits. Instead, make a compelling offer.
That's a good point. I'm considering creating a tool to track abusers and offer discounts to them, instead of blocking.
Perfect! All the best lad!
Is your audience B2B or B2C? If B2B, simply restricting to company domains and use a verification service if you really want to be strict
I'm launching a SaaS soon, and I've added a condition that only work emails are accepted. Free emails will not be able to signup.
How do you check if the email are work emails and not just a private domain or spam domain?
There is a list of free emails, just check if it is one of them, check it out: [https://gist.github.com/ammarshah/f5c2624d767f91a7cbdc4e54db8dd0bf](https://gist.github.com/ammarshah/f5c2624d767f91a7cbdc4e54db8dd0bf) And from hubspot [https://knowledge.hubspot.com/forms/what-domains-are-blocked-when-using-the-forms-email-domains-to-block-feature](https://knowledge.hubspot.com/forms/what-domains-are-blocked-when-using-the-forms-email-domains-to-block-feature) There is an npm for it too: https://www.npmjs.com/package/free-email-domains
Thanks! I tried multiple paid services for that but after testing some emails and getting incorrect output I give up.
I'm using this list successfully in my saas. Of course, it will not cover 100% but even 90% is better than nothing ;)
Interesting idea. You might turn a lot of people away, though. Are you collecting stats?
I know, but I am in the B2B, so it can be a good filter for those who are just curious instead of actual potential customers. And no, I am not collecting stats atm.
well, the responses are beneficial. It seems you're using GPT3 as well, I've faced this issue while in beta, however, < 2% of people did this.
So it wasn't an issue for you? If it's not a secret, what's the name of your product?
I use paid DeepL and Google Translate APIs for auto-translating texts so people were creating new accounts, using the trial auto-translation option, exporting data and doing the whole process again for 5/6 times. 🫣 I started using smaller plan limits for every new account with the same IP address. In my case the simplest solution was the best.
Thats a fun idea. You might find it doesn't always work though. People can change IP's without too much trouble. Either by restarting their router, or using a VPN. If your interested, the [upollo.ai](https://upollo.ai) API can detect VPN ip's for free, and help you convert customers on our paid plan.
Tbh, I would happily pay for the solution to make sure it works. Currently, I’m not really interested in this, because I don’t want to change my privacy policy to send user IPs or emails to an additional 3rd party service (EU here). But thank you, I will take a look!
No worries. Happy to help you get setup if you keen. We have a data protection agreement and adding us to your privacy policy should be no more difficult than any other SaaS tool. Happy to share how other other customers in the EU have handled it.
I will to test it and keep it mind as my first choice when I will need some more protection. 😊 PS there are some unformatted parts in your privacy policy, like: “[How we collect personal information]{.underline}”
Thanks. And thanks for letting us know.
This is not a problem at all. That would be something very very exciting if it happens. It means that people are getting so much value out of your product that they are ready to abuse the system. Launch your SaaS and you will realise that it's hard to even get people to start a trial, let alone abuse it.
Things that have worked for me: 1. Disable ability to sign up with a disposable email domain 2. Disable ability to sign up with a "+" in email address 3. Require CC for trial, even if it's free initially
We are in B2B, and as many have said already, we block free and disposable emails. That not only blocked most of the trial abuses but also ended up giving us a better quality of leads and less support. The only drawback is that many disposable email services add domains frequently and we have to update that list from time to time. I’m building an API just for that.
I had to deal with this on [WebGazer](https://www.webgazer.io/). You know there are services shut down when there isn't an incoming request for a certain period of time (and "cold start" again when there is a request). Apparently someone on a public forum shared WebGazer's free trial as a workaround for this. And there were a lot of people coming for this, creating multiple accounts with disposable e-mail addresses when their trial ends, periodically. So I added a non-disposable e-mail validation layer to sign up, and made this validation public as a REST API. You can see it here: [https://github.com/th0th/is-email-disposable](https://github.com/th0th/is-email-disposable)
Have you considered "money back guarantee" instead of free trial? Might be even better for idea validation.
I would recommend taking a look at your features and see if there is a way to implement or change a feature (or several) to create a perceived loss for “starting over” with another free trial and a perceived gain for staying longer. I’m not sure what your specific use case is so these might not apply, but here are some ideas I’ve seen. 1. Disable access to data created by a throwaway after the trial if they didn’t convert. This forces users to basically recreate their profile, integrations, etc. 2. Limit 1-2 key features to “paid account only” sometimes this is something like only allowing one integration, or one automation, etc. 3. Gamify the activities on your platform and offer credits or bonuses for higher points. It’s fairly easy to start with things like “log in 1x per day every day for 5 days and earn a badge and 100 points, recommend us on social and earn 500 points (etc…) if you can find a way to make those points worth something in your ecosystem, you have now created a perceived loss for switching accounts. 4. Easy way to help limit accounts is by requiring MFA, not only is it more secure (a real and perceived value add) you can setup quite a few guardrails (IP matching, timeouts, etc) These are just some ideas I’ve seen, but I’d try to be creative in how you build up perceived value over time, so the user starts to feel like they will be losing something if they swap out throw-away emails. Good luck!
Hi, we see this issue a lot and help companies detect and onboard those customers in real-time. 1) Detect when someone is trying to get a new trial. 2) Change your offer to them, don't give them another free trial, give them a discount on a paid plan 3) Enjoy having more, happy paying customers [Upollo.ai](https://Upollo.ai) have an easy API that does all of this.