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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?

#41

Post by Reggie_Walls »

tonetheman wrote: post #15

We had this problems a lot. You have to make it painful enough that scammers do not want to bother. Put Cloudflare in front of your IP. Everytime someone abuses you then block their IP at CF. If you can automate this even better. Reduce the service for a free trial in someway that hurts hackers but not real customers. You will have to think about this it might tricky or not possible. Add software to your stack to wat…

Great advice, consider different free tiers as well (anonymous users get x free uses, registered get y more, registered w/CC get z more free uses etc).

Once you have your CC subscribers really work on retaining them and reducing churn, if they try to cancel show then messaging that reminds them of the value of the service or offer them a discount, as examples.

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

#42

Post by nyellin »

Fellow OSS founder here (robusta.dev for Kubernetes monitoring).

Can you explain in more detail the way people are misusing your service? Aren't you running within someone else's infrastructure? At least that's how I understood your site.

We have an extended free trial for our SaaS platform (the only part that isn't open source) without a cc and have seen a lot of usage but nothing we'd flag as abuse. (Lots of fake accounts, but those don't hurt us.) Different product though so obviously the potential for abuse is different.

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

#43

Post by estaseuropano »

shoo wrote: post #29

one alternative idea to free trials from Jason Cohen's ancient 2013 microconf talk, 21:00 minute mark > another hack: lotta people have free trials. 15 day free trial, 30 day free trial. makes sense. customers want to test us out first, no one trusts anyone, that's fine. but i hate free trials actually, especially for bootstrapped companies, because you never get the money back. most people that sign up with a credit…

I heartily disagree. Maybe its just my privacy conscious european-ness but seeing how companies keep leaking data I do not went to give my data, much less my CC, to a service I'm not actually sure i will end up using.

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

#44

Post by CPLX »

paskozdilar wrote: post #35

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…

> Personally, if a service requires me to put in my CC info before even trying it, I am not using it.

That seems unlikely. I am going to go out on a limb and guess that you’ve signed up for at least one service in the past year that required a credit card up front.

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

#45

Post by acjacobson »

xxs wrote: post #23
wizwit999 wrote: post #2

I think you should collect CC.

credit card numbers tend to require proper PCI compliance and audit. Storing credit cards is quite the liability, and unless I know I can trust the company entirely, they won't be getting any credit cards.

Most companies shouldn't be storing CC numbers in this day and age but using tokenized cards instead. Let Stripe worry about PCI compliance, and OP can simply advertise which processor they're using so customers feel secure.

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

#46

Post by dmurray »

shoo wrote: post #29

one alternative idea to free trials from Jason Cohen's ancient 2013 microconf talk, 21:00 minute mark > another hack: lotta people have free trials. 15 day free trial, 30 day free trial. makes sense. customers want to test us out first, no one trusts anyone, that's fine. but i hate free trials actually, especially for bootstrapped companies, because you never get the money back. most people that sign up with a credit…

I'd be happy with the money-back guarantee from a trustworthy company, but in practice I'd be worried about them increasing the friction of cancelling/claiming the refund. Most founders are probably well-intentioned here but a few bad apples make it difficult to trust anyone.

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

#47

Post by ushakov »

3 possibilities, learned the hard way:

1) Offer a limited free tier

2) Ask CC before free trial, you don't need customers that are not able to pay you later

3) Make a shared demo account where customers can log in and check out the product without need to commit

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

#48

Post by js4ever »

nyellin wrote: post #42

Fellow OSS founder here (robusta.dev for Kubernetes monitoring). Can you explain in more detail the way people are misusing your service? Aren't you running within someone else's infrastructure? At least that's how I understood your site. We have an extended free trial for our SaaS platform (the only part that isn't open source) without a cc and have seen a lot of usage but nothing we'd flag as abuse. (Lots of fake a…

Indeed we deploy to 5 cloud providers, and we give full root ssh access to the VMs (even if we didn't there is always a way to get access through the web ui, think about WordPress plugin for eg) Some users used the vm to do ddos, port scanning, crypto mining, sending spam, hosting illegal stuffs, whatever you can imagine ... But worse!

But we had exactly zero issues with people's providing a CC

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

#49

Post by shafyy »

mkl wrote: post #8

Can you limit resource use after some reasonable amount? Seems like you've got the tools for that already. "Network Firewall [...] + Web Application Firewall", "IP Rate Limiter", "Alerts to detect abnormal activity", etc. I can see why people don't want to give their credit card to someone they haven't made a deliberate decision to give money to, or to mix their social life with business. Edit: there's also the probl…

Limiting resources seems also the best way to go about this in my mind.

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

#50

Post by Havoc »

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.

>- trigger warning -

FYI the idea is to specify the nature of the trigger upfront. e.g. Self harm or whatever. That way people can judge whether they want to read the rest of the comment or not.

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