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I’m the founder of a small bootstrapped SAAS and people use disposable email addresses all the time to avoid paying for our product. We don’t sell any data.

• hiq 5y ago
  Why don't you ask for a credit card instead of relying on email?
  • wongarsu 5y ago
    People don't like giving their credit cards for free trials, mostly because of services that have abused this by automatically charging for a paid subscription if you don't cancel your free trial.
  • tedunangst 5y ago
    As someone signing up for the service, it's far easier for me to deal with unwanted email after signup than recurring credit card charges. I don't sign up for anything that requires credit card for free trial.
• teakettle42 5y ago
  > people use disposable email addresses all the time to avoid paying for our product. From the prospective subscriber’s perspective, that’s your problem to worry about — not theirs. > We don’t sell any data. How should users know that? It’s also not just a matter of selling data — almost all companies will spam your email address, even if you check the box asking them not to.
  • nojito 5y ago
    >From the prospective subscriber’s perspective, that’s your problem to worry about — not theirs. exactly...which is why there are blacklists like the one linked in the OP.
    • teakettle42 5y ago
      … which makes it the prospective subscriber’s problem, pushing nearly all risk onto them, and requiring them to trust that the service won’t spam them or sell their e-mail address.
      • deleted 5y ago
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      • JshWright 5y ago
        What alternative do you suggest?
        • asimops 5y ago
          How do you know people use those emails to bypass payment?
          • JshWright 5y ago
            I have no idea how they know that. Perhaps they found a reddit or Twitter thread describing how to abuse their platform with anonymous email addresses.
          • skinkestek 5y ago
            I guess: - multiple sign ups using different emails and similar name - same ip address - same data etc. Don't underestimate greed or laziness.
        • bigiain 5y ago
          Depends hugely on the SAAS and it's current and desired customer base. But some obvious candidates are 1) discontinue free trials. 2) provide enough obvious value to convert the current funnel of free trials into paying customers at a high enough rate that you don't care about the "freeloaders" 3) radically differentiate the support available on free trial accounts. In the long run, and dev effort/time spend integrating email domain blacklists is just time taken away from building features that add value to the service/company. It's only possible that spending that time adding features will turn the conversion rate up, but its guaranteed that fencing off the top of the funnel will reduce the number of conversions.
  • Karunamon 5y ago
    >almost all companies will spam your email address, even if you check the box asking them not to. I find this very hard to believe. "Spam" has a specific definition; the most important bit of which is that it is unsolicited. Mails landing in your inbox that you'd rather not get, but which are not unsolicited (say, by you signing up for an account and confirming your address), are not spam by definition. "Almost all companies" would find themselves unable to send email in short order if what they were delivering was spam. Definitions are important. Let's not misuse them.
    • AlexandrB 5y ago
      As a user, I don't at all care about the technical/legal definition of spam. As with obscenity spam is a case of "I know it when I see it".
      • deleted 5y ago
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    • SahAssar 5y ago
      Most email I get from services is unsolicited. While I did sign up for the services I did not solicit every newsletter, marketing email, "notification" and so on. For 98% percent of services I use I mainly want my email for one thing: a way to reset my password. Often I need to unsubscribe from each of them individually and then navigate some sort of "notification preferences" interface. Even after that has been done a lot of them seem to default any new newsletter or preference to on instead of deriving the preference from the closest existing option.
      • Karunamon 5y ago
        Yes you did. When you open a relationship with a company (by signing up to use their services), they are allowed to market to you, send you newsletters, and so forth, until such time as you terminate that relationship. It isn't spam because you don't want it. If you actually don't want it, then click 'unsubscribe' - and if they continue to bother you afterwards (which, FWIW, I've seen a reputable company do a grand total of once in years), then and only then, is it spam.
  • deleted 5y ago
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• cinntaile 5y ago
  Is it worth the hassle to have a free tier? Is it a good enough funnel to the paid tiers?
• emptysongglass 5y ago
  And that's fair enough but this is just another thing that businesses have to chalk up to as a cost of business because users' privacy is more important than your dollars. I have sympathy for businesses out to make a buck: they are the reason I get to put food on my table. But on the scale of balance between users' rights and business rights over the last twenty years, it's no contest: business rights reign triumphant.
• ipaddr 5y ago
  How do they avoid payment? Do you have a trial period and people are signing up with different emails?
• Juliate 5y ago
  But why would having a "valid" email address help you more getting payment? At most you may send reminders, but even then, those may end up in a spambox? Even once you've verified the email, you have not much of a guarantee it will stay verified/working long. That's more the subscriber's problem, if they want to continue to use your product.
  • karussell 5y ago
    Probably it is not the validity of an Email but the fact that you can use many disposable Emails and misuse the free tier / trial.
  • wenbin 5y ago
    It's easier to create many disposable email addresses than "real" email. To get a new "real" email address, you need to fill a lengthy form (e.g., try it on Gmail.com now) and it's not easy to automate the process. But it takes only one-click to create a new disposable email address. Some disposable email providers also provide APIs, so you can create addresses in batch. People may exploit paid services by creating many new accounts - 1. Free trials: When trail period ends, create a new account. 2. Services with metered billing: Use the service, then refuse to pay. Then create a new account. Then refuse to pay. Then create a new account... Of course, (theoretically) if the service provider has enough resources (i.e., money, time, knowledge...), they can always find a better solution than banning all disposable emails.
    • nulbyte 5y ago
      > It's easier to create many disposable email addresses than "real" email. The difference between real and disposable is manufactured. A novice could register a domain, sign up for email hosting, and set up a catch all for cheap.
• uallo 5y ago
  Recently, I wanted to try a web service but they did not let me register with a disposable email address. Well, I guess I will not try the service then.
  • karussell 5y ago
    And how would you protect your service from users that just sign up with disposable Emails for the 7 day trial over and over again?
    • chrisseaton 5y ago
      > just sign up with disposable Emails for the 7 day trial over and over again? That's a lot of effort to go through to avoid paying for something. And I guess you can't keep your data or configuration, if the app has any.
      • karussell 5y ago
        That happens quite frequently to our SaaS where people need free access to a new API key. We try to block multiple registrations but there are people who also invest into proxies to circumvent this protection...
        • johannes1234321 5y ago
          people who want to bypass those restrictions can easily do it. It is trivial to get a bunch of mail addresses to use, even without "disposable mail" providers. People who try to abuse the trial period over and over will do. Blocking the disposable mail providers however also blocks users who are curious, but not yet committed. I argue that maths is negative for your business and a better approachbis to make it easy tonget started, but show them clear benefit of switching plans. Maybe a cheap entry level plan with a small set of convenience features, not available to the test account.
    • simongr3dal 5y ago
      Just a few idea: Make it useful to have a persistent identity, so you have something to lose if you abandon the account (like a library of games in steam, or a network of friends on facebook). Require a payment method and limit how many free trials can be activated with the same card. Require a phone number since they a harder to get than emails.
• maronato 5y ago
  Disposable email domains aren't the issue here. Creating a disposable @gmail account to avoid paying is possible too. Don't use emails to assert user identity. Most companies use credit cards for that. Or make it so that creating another account from scratch is more of a hassle than paying. Better yet, offer free tiers.
  • lategloriousgnu 5y ago
    You can only create a small number of gmail accounts, since ever account needs to be linked to a valid phone number. Google actively work to prevent using their platform in this way.
    • aaaaaaaaaaab 5y ago
      You can use protonmail.
    • NorwegianDude 5y ago
      You actually don't need have to have a phone number to use Gmail. You can skip that step.
      • usr1106 5y ago
        I don't think so. I have numerous old Google accounts with their passwords in my password manager. Not for gmail, but for Google Groups lists, Google+ and various other services that no longer exist. Whenever I log in (in an account container of course) I cannot continue without adding a phone number. Have not found a way to skip the step (well, have not tried for some months now, trying to avoid Google increasingly). None of the accounts has stored any data. I would understand that Google would block people from misusing them as free cloud storage.
        • usr1106 5y ago
          Where could I get disposable phone numbers from at a reasonable cost? So that I can receive just the first SMS. These are not valuable accounts, I don't need password reset years later.
• Nextgrid 5y ago
  Out of curiosity, what does your service do and how do you know that these users would've paid for the service otherwise? As in with piracy, the argument is that it hurts sales but it's very difficult to determine whether that is really true.
  • brightball 5y ago
    I can't speak for the OP but free trial period abuse is very common. "Would have paid for the service" vs "Are actively working to use the service without paying for it" are two different things. I worked for a company that had some free tools on the web, with no published API. Those tools were scraped well above the T&C limitations to be mined by other companies. We had a "free forever" account that you could use to monitor a single domain. Within the user table there were multiple instances of 20 to 300 (worst case) myaccount+<domain>@mycompanydomain.com trying to abuse the single domain rule without paying for it. In one case, the results were being packaged up to be shown in somebody else's product. I'm certainly not advocating for spam or selling data (the company I mentioned didn't do this either), but abuse it the more common use case that web businesses deal with. To combat abuse, 90% of the battle is to identify where the abuse is coming from first.
    • greenyoda 5y ago
      If offering "free forever" causes problems, maybe that's too generous? What if it was only free for a couple of weeks - enough time to evaluate the service but not enough time to use it for commercial purposes?
• nitn 5y ago
  Once the my data is in your server. There is no way for me to know what you are doing with my data. You could be selling it. How will I know?
• dragonwriter 5y ago
  > I’m the founder of a small bootstrapped SAAS and people use disposable email addresses all the time to avoid paying for our product. So, make it worthwhile to pay for the product.
  • Barrin92 5y ago
    that's not really how it works. If you create something and unless you license it permissively that product is yours and you get to set the terms and conditions. If it is now mainstream to basically feel you're entitled on setting the terms for other businesses or stealing their software then nobody needs to complain when any email relay service gets just blacklisted. If people now think it's okay to abuse multiple accounts to avoid paying for software that they use and that costs money to build then nobody needs to be surprised that everything gets an identity verification.
    • nulbyte 5y ago
      > that's not really how it works. If you create something and unless you license it permissively that product is yours and you get to set the terms and conditions. It's exactly how it works, if you want to succeed. If you don't offer value that enough people are willing to pay, you still own the product, but it's worthless.
    • dragonwriter 5y ago
      > that's not really how it works. Yes, it really is how it works. > If you create something and unless you license it permissively that product is yours and you get to set the terms and conditions. And if you want people to pay for it, you have to offer enough marginal value over not paying for it so that they choose to do so. The concrete, social, and personal moral consequences of violating social norms can provide part of that value by weighing negatively on the “not” side, in the case there is an available but “not permitted” mechanism which gives the benefits without paying. But that doesn't change the basic fact that you have to provide adequate value if you want people to voluntarily pay. > If people now think it's okay to abuse multiple accounts to avoid paying for software that they use Then models where you give the full service for free for each account with the limits actually applied that people are exploiting that way probably isn't the right model for that SaaS.
• WheatM 5y ago
• franga2000 5y ago
  If making a new email address is all it takes to get free stuff then your trial model is broken. If your service stores data, a time-limited trial with no export option is usually enough. If it's more or less stateless, then you need to limit other things as well. Would you be willing to share what the SAAS is? Outside of content providers (streaming, etc.) I've never really seen any reason to abuse trials. Besides, the whole idea of a "disposable email blacklist" is ridiculous. Are you going to block Gmail? Gmail addresses take like 1 minute to make. If not, you've already lost the battle, so do us all a favor and stop this blacklist nonsense.
• bigiain 5y ago
  > We don’t sell any data. Not only do I have zero reason to trust you when you say that (because every person planning on selling my data ways the same thing). But I also have zero reason to trust you're skilled or resourced enough to adequately secure my data (or have sufficient motivation to do so). And I also know that one day you'll likely sell your SAAS, and will have no control over what the people you sell it to will do. If you've got enough traction that people are willing to jump through minor disposable email address hoops to use your product for longer than the free trial, but not enough traction to convince them to pay for it, I reckon you'd be better off building more features that add value and reconsidering your free trial plan - instead of devoting any dev effort into rejecting disposable emails.
  • throwawayboise 5y ago
    I signed up for a KVM hosting provider. They initially rejected my account because I used a "disposable" email address. Their experience is that use of disposable email addresses is highly correlated to use of their VM instances to send spam or carry out other hostile activities. That explantion was acceptable to me; if it works for them. I might note that they only send me transactional email (statement of charges for the month) and no marketing.