
Ask HN: How to best handle users creating throwaway accounts? - throwaway214625
Context<p>I&#x27;ve created a SaaS product which has a free tier and an unlimited tier. The users seem to like the product and find it useful. At least useful enough to keep creating free accounts instead of upgrading when they reach the free monthly limit.<p>Aside from creating an &quot;email verification&quot; flow, what kind of techniques do other products use to prevent this kind of abuse?<p>Note: I realize the irony with my HN name!
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rpeden
It sounds like the free tier lets people do the same things as the paid tier
and only limits quantity, so people are just stacking free accounts to get
around paying for it.

Maybe this isn't the best way to segment your market? It depends heavily on
your product and how it works, but perhaps there's a way to make it so that
the free tier lets people try the product and understand how it works. You
could then make it so that some extra functionality is available _only_ to
paid users.

An example of this is Webflow[1]. A free accound is fine for mocking up a
website, but you can only have one project, and you can't export the HTML and
CSS. This works well, because I was able to use a free account to see how the
product worked, and when I decided I wanted to export what I had created, I
was happy to upgrade to a paid account.

You can also see this at play in the Wordpress plugin market. There are plenty
of plugins that have a free version available, and also offer a premium
version that includes support and extra features.

The common thread here is that upgrading to the paid version of the product
includes more features, not just more quantity. This approach may or may not
work for your product. Even if it doesn't _right now_ , perhaps there are
features you could add only to the paid tier that would entice people to
upgrade?

[1][https://webflow.com/](https://webflow.com/)

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jakozaur
I just blacklisted few email domains which fixed 90% of problems.

Some radical step if you target big business is disallow free email providers
(@gmail.com). That may create some backslash, but if you target enterprise
that allow you to focus.

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throwaway214625
Thanks-- that's something I hadn't thought of. It appears most of the users
don't use free providers so that may be an option.

