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Ivan Spadacenta

How to avoid people to abuse trial plans without asking for CC?

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While developing a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform, I offer a free trial plan to users. Upon signing up, users receive a certain amount of credits to experience the service. Once these credits are used, if they wish to continue using it, they must subscribe to a paid plan. However, how can I prevent users from creating a new account to continue using the service for free? One solution might be to require a credit card at the time of sign-up. However, based on my research online, this approach can reduce sign-ups by more than 90%, and I want people to try out the service. Alternatively, I considered limiting sign-ups to users who use an email account from providers that verify a user's identity before activating the email. But even this approach may significantly limit the number of users who might sign up. Do you have any other ideas?

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Hugh Parry
Hey Ivan, The good news is that if people are abusing your free tier then you've got a good product! It really depends on what type of abuse you're experiencing. If it's manual but from regular types of users, it could be as simple as limiting to ips. Requiring email confirmation is helpful, but yeah it does provide friction. It's also worth thinking about how much this stops somebody from making a new account (it's not hard to just make a new email). For me, I'd avoid requiring a card to sign up - in my experience this will have a huge negative impact on your funnel (though, you may just be filtering out potential users who don't ever intend to pay). If it's automated then some sort of CAPTCHA on the form would be useful. We've built a pretty nifty product for that ourselves https://prosopo.io/ Best advice would be to try and do this yourself for a few SaaS products, and see how they try and limit you doing this
Ivan Spadacenta
@hugh_parry thanks for your answer. I will look at prosopo.io. Just to clarify. I'm already asking email confirmation. Maybe I just had a new idea... ask for phone confirmation sending them a code via SMS or maybe whatsapp... so they can't reuse the same phone number...
Alexandre Schouwey
@hugh_parry @ivan_spadacenta Using phone numbers for verification is a great idea! I suggest conducting an A/B test to see if it affects the top of your funnel negatively. By A/B testing, you'll be able to determine which approach works best for you.
Alexandre Schouwey
Hey Ivan, I totally get your struggle here. We're actually working on a cool solution called FraudLock, it's designed to tackle this exact issue by preventing users from signing up multiple times from the same device. We're still shaping it up and would love your input. You can join the early access here https://www.fraudlock.io/ and have your say in what features we roll out first. Cheers