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Ask HN: How to provide a free trial without being abused?

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Re: Ask HN: How to provide a free trial without being abused?

#31

Post by mkl »

splatzone wrote: post #22
humanistbot wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a dark pattern and will infuriate both your abusers and legitimate users.

I think I’d only consider it dark if my card was going to be charged. If the app admitted it was just to verify that I’m a real person, for security reasons, I’d be fine with it.

The problem is you don't know if your card is going to be charged. It's too easy for companies to hide things in long terms of service click-throughs, or for users to misunderstand new services, or for companies to charge cards "by accident". I'm certainly pretty doubtful that I completely understand what I'm agreeing to with a new company. The simplest safest solution is to not give them your card.

Re: Ask HN: How to provide a free trial without being abused?

#32

Post by tomerv »

sokoloff wrote: post #7

Anyone who won’t give you a credit card for the free trial isn’t likely to give you a credit card later to become a customer*. In this space, giving a credit card seems perfectly normal and serves as a vetting function of seriousness for you. * I can concoct exceptions of course: worker who wants to try it for work but doesn’t have their own company card being one. But if you’re targeting cloud users, “doing whatever…

Your concocted exception is actually a very plausible scenario in my opinion. In the past 2 years or so I convinced my workplace (well, a previous workplace) to spend some money on two freemium products: one is buying a few licenses for PyCharm Professional, and the other was a platform for doing coding interviews. The free version was the only reason I even considered these products. As an employee in a big corp, this is my only reasonable route.

Re: Ask HN: How to provide a free trial without being abused?

#33

Post by foerbert »

sokoloff wrote: post #7

Anyone who won’t give you a credit card for the free trial isn’t likely to give you a credit card later to become a customer*. In this space, giving a credit card seems perfectly normal and serves as a vetting function of seriousness for you. * I can concoct exceptions of course: worker who wants to try it for work but doesn’t have their own company card being one. But if you’re targeting cloud users, “doing whatever…

I can't say I agree with this. AWS has the size, reputation, and sheer near-unavoidability to find themselves with significantly more leeway in this kind of thing.

Just because AWS can get away with something doesn't mean you can.

Re: Ask HN: How to provide a free trial without being abused?

#35

Post by paskozdilar »

Your basic problem is that a single person can pretend to be many persons, and therefore use up much more resources than expected.

The only way to prevent this is to identify the users in some way. Every way of identification is a tradeoff between convenience and security.

CC card info is very secure (it's really hard to fake a CC), but it's extremely inconvenient. Personally, if a service requires me to put in my CC info before even trying it, I am not using it.

Phone number is fairly secure (can be faked, but faker must spend money to buy phone cards, so their costs scale linearly), and it's kinda inconvenient, but not really, since every website and its grandmother ask for 2FA nowdays. It's more inconvenient for you, actually, since you have to find a way to send an SMS to any phone, anywhere in the world.

Email addresses can be secure (but only because most email providers require email confirmation over phone number), but they are the most convenient option I can think of. Ngrok does something like that, they require an email for an account, and provide you with a key you can use to use their service. Free option only gets you like 4 tunnels and 40 connections/minute, which I assume is negligible, given their total traffic.

Re: Ask HN: How to provide a free trial without being abused?

#36

Post by tomerv »

jrumbut wrote: post #12

Just something that occurred to me: You could make a link allowing them to explain by email their need for a no-CC-required trial. That way you make a little speedbump and get a an email you know they use to market to (with opt-in). In reality though, I suspect that most of the users who won't put in a card for a trial won't put in a card to pay either.

I think this is a great idea. You don't even have to market it like that: just have a very simple sign up form for requesting a trial. The only "requirement" would be a short discussion with a representative from your end where the customer explains why they want the trail.

Market it as a positive (free trial!) and not a negative (if you don't want to give us your CC info...) and you'll have human psychology in your favor. You also get insight into your users' use cases for free.

Re: Ask HN: How to provide a free trial without being abused?

#37

Post by marginalia_nu »

pid-1 wrote: post #3

- trigger warning - Allow the whole onboarding process to be done without a CC, don't even mention that. But when a user is doing their first deploy, tell them they need a CC to complete this step. Thanks to the sunken cost fallacy, users will be more likely to proceed.

That would make me not only tell everyone I know what a bag of dicks your company is, like people I haven't seen in years would get a hand written letter telling them about this, my techno-illiterate grandma, every. one. I. know. I'd hand out free T-shirts printed with an account of my experience. After this I would then sign up for your competitor's most expensive offering out of sheer spite.

Re: Ask HN: How to provide a free trial without being abused?

#38

Post by sokoloff »

xxs wrote: post #30
sokoloff wrote: post #7

Anyone who won’t give you a credit card for the free trial isn’t likely to give you a credit card later to become a customer*. In this space, giving a credit card seems perfectly normal and serves as a vetting function of seriousness for you. * I can concoct exceptions of course: worker who wants to try it for work but doesn’t have their own company card being one. But if you’re targeting cloud users, “doing whatever…

>Anyone who won’t give you a credit card for the free trial isn’t likely to give you a credit card later to become a customer This is extremely weird. It's a B2B - I won't ever use my own credit card just to try some service, heck - I won't provide my credit card to an unknown entity that may lack PIC compliance, either. Asking for the company/budget/contract review/etc. for trial, etc. is a massive hassle as well. >…

Yes, but the people who don’t trust them with their CC are much more difficult (non-)customers to reach. Filtering the set of prospects to the easiest ones to convert, providing that set is still large, seems like a good 80/20 use of a startup’s limited time.

If you were a really hot prospect, super-interested in using elest.io for a big project but didn’t want to give a CC because , I’m sure you’d find a way to contact them by email and try to work something out. And they’d find a way to vet you or just turn on a free account for you.* The casual “no way I’m giving my CC” people aren’t high-likelihood future paying customers.

Gate with a CC, make sure there’s a way to send an email/free text form and move on with building the company.

* “no way I’m sending an email either for a free trial just because I won’t give a CC.” “OK, you’re not a prospective customer. It’s a numbers game.”

Re: Ask HN: How to provide a free trial without being abused?

#40

Post by zulln »

js4ever wrote: post #21
anatolinicolae wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you want to get stricter only allow incoming connections from the trial user's IP to stop them hosting scam landing pages. This could actually be the easiest way to deal with it. You can technically remove the block via system firewall, but I guess the abuse is only for cloud VMs that Elest.io provides and not the BYOVM ones, so you can use provider firewall rules to enforce the limit.

Indeed, no issues at all with BYOVM, and for other VM we have full control on the firewall from the cloud providers and we can block outgoing traffic and limit incoming traffic to the tester IP, I will definitely investigate this!

How often do one change IP when on cellular? I have no idea, but seems like it might become a problem. Probably worth the trade-off though.
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