Comment by a-saleh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by a-saleh | Hacker News Reader

The best solution to this problem I heard was to along these lines:

* have a separation between accounts and users. Account is the entity that pays for the service. Usually account has users associated.

* collect payment/credit card information on account creation

This way, you don't really care about user+1, because you have their payment info already, and can assume at least some intention to pay after their free tier is up.

There are many legitimate reasons why somebody while doing evaluation would create several users, i.e. I do name@a.com as well as name+testing@a.com in few services.

If you find out that too many of your customers are not willing to pay, look at it more as a business problem, trying to reach better customers that you can charge more, rather than to better enforce some account de-duplication.

I think I heard this approach from patio11, Amy Hoy or some interview on Mixergy?

Thank you, I like the idea of rules. Billing, user, admin etc.

The issue with the credit card verification before trying the product is that as a user, I do not like that approach.

I want to try first and eventually pay. That is the experience I'd like to offer.

The best approach to credit cards, imho, is the Heroku one: you get a little bit of stuff no questions asked, but you get twice the free stuff if you validate a CC. This way, the user has an incentive to put a CC down even if she’s not going to pay right away, which is good in itself (because you can then leverage it by making it extra-easy to impulse-buy later, as well as improving the quality of your db).

For the record, I am one of those people using + as a tag, just so my username a bit different site by site but still easy enough to remember (yeah I use a password manager, but a little bit extra hygiene never hurt anyone). I’d be incredibly pissed off if sites started trying to be clever with it; I guess I could tolerate a duplicate detector, as long as it doesn’t stop me from signing up as soon as a + is detected.

If you see people abusing it, I would have a “hunting” routine and gently ask the worst offenders to shape up lest they get banned.

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