Ask HN: How do you handle more than one free account per person?

[Ixiaus]

Mostly in the title. To elaborate a bit further on the service: I offer a free tier account that requires only an email and a password to sign up with. The service is not cheap to run, so the free accounts are very limited (mostly just a taster for the paid account tiers). I've noticed a few people signing up five to ten accounts with variations on their email (but are largely the same).

How do all of you handle the issue of pruning/filtering registrations? Is this is a dead-end battle? Should I try to only allow 1 registration per IP address for say a two week time frame (to account for DHCP) - their IP can be updated every time they log in; this could catch 70% of the users that aren't smart enough to use a proxy...? Should I even bother?

I'm leaning towards the "Should I even bother?" side of this because I can't think of a truly reliable method of doing this and that if I focus on converting as many free users to paid tiers the paying customers can offset even the wily free account creators.

[eggbrain]

What percentage of users do this, that you can tell? If its 3% of users, it might not even be worth it.

That being said, why not allow a few registrations per IP address (versus 1). You'd hate to punish possible paying clients by preventing them from signing up for your service because someone else on the same IP did the same thing.

Finally, it may be worth it to send an email to the people you notice and ask how you can improve the product. It would let them know that you know what they are doing, but you still want them as paying customers, not to punish them or push them away.

[uptown]

I'd send them an email & offer them a discounted rate for X months on whatever non-free tier is the best fit for their actual use. After that time they can either go back to their shenanigans, or keep paying your full price.

[ctb9]

I second this. I'm currently guilty of doing exactly what the OP is describing. The free tier was slightly too small for my needs, so I'm using two accounts for development. When I'm ready to use the service in production, I will gladly signup for a paid account.

[Ixiaus]

Good suggestions, thank you!

[pewpew]

just block duplicate accounts, whoever is going through the trouble setting 10 fake accounts, won't be paying you any time soon.