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Appreciate the thoughtful answer despite the downvotes; I didn't consider how bad fraudulent email creation still is -- would CAPTCHA protection have solved thi

• jrockway 4y ago
  They weren't actually doing much automation for account creation; we would see accounts created from mobile phone providers using mobile UAs, and then after they had an API key we'd see the accounts used from compromised cloud hosting accounts. (Free CI trials were probably a big chunk of this too, but I can't prove that.) The mistake we made was really being too generous with free trials; you need the compute to test our product, but free compute is something you just can't give out these days because of the crypto gold rush. I signed up for fly.io recently and they just ask you for a credit card as soon as you hit "create account". We were scared of that at the time, but I thought it was completely reasonable.