Hacker News Reader

Comment by arendtio | Hacker News Reader

I hate when a website offers 'Sign in with Google' as the sole sign-in option. What happened to have email as the default account creation method?

View on HN

I’ve launched apps with free trials in the past and when I allowed email, there were 100 fake emails from temporary email services for every 1 real one. Had to do more work to block those as they were eating up all the resources from paying users

If you have an extensive demo page covering my use case, I would prefer a low-cost entry offer to use my Google account. Upgrading to a more expensive option later is usually not such a hard task for me when I really love the product.

Lately, I had a case when someone informed me that he would take my e-mail from his newsletter mailing list because I seemed to be a dead address (and every address generated cost for him). I replied that I did not like to be tracked (implying that I had read the newsletter) and we had a nice conversation. Not every fake e-mail is as fake as it seems ;-)

Apparently, Thunderbird can be quite good at beating E-Mail Tracking.

Doesn't this just further the point that your potential customers don't want to identify themselves to try your product? Punting on anti-sybil or anti-spam by requiring a strongly identity-linked account (Google accounts can't be created from VPNs or without phone numbers, for instance) is user-hostile.

If your free users are using up paid user resources, that's a different problem.

One of the nice parts about starting a business is that you get to choose your customers. There is no ethical or moral rule that you must provide access to everyone who wants to use your app. You are even allowed to make decisions that reduce your revenue in favor of other priorities.

The problem is not that I want peoples real information, I really couldn't care less. It's the fact that some of these are clearly the same people creating hundreds of emails to just keep resubscribing to a free trial.

I could tell because there were emails with the sequence of:

1@xyz.com 2@xyz.com ... etc

Low trust world, I guess. If I'm poking around to see whether I like something or not, no way am I giving it a real email.

I've become even more drastic: if you want me to sign in at all before I can try out your product "for free", you already have one less potential customer.

Not much choice with a GPU backed service. Way too expensive to not have at least a verified email filter in front of it, and Google is the simplest most "universal" plug and play OIDC provider.

Sure, there's plenty good reasons from the service provider's perspective. However, there's not a lot of good reasons from my perspective.

Yeah it’s not really free if you require me to give you things in exchange is it.

Ya it's really the Google-as-only-option problem. I immediately close the window when I see that and move on.

Are there any "privacy-first" SSO options? Maybe Proton or Mullvad or some similarly positioned company should think about this. Or maybe it's just way too hard to break into the Google/Apple duopoly.

Using SSO permits faster launch.

It’s annoying when it’s Google only though.

If you’re going to offer SSO, at least take the lowly amount of time to add some other providers. I genuinely don’t believe anyone is launching so quickly that they don’t have time to add a second or third option.

I totally agree, I hate it. Just answer the question of why people do this.

Monkey paw curls, Twitter and Facebook are added.

Using zero sign in options permits an even faster launch! See if your CEO will go for that option!

Maybe if you have skill issues.

No, using SSO simply let's you worry about one less thing.

It also provides decent spam prevention, and high probability people will check the associated email address

Reply on news.ycombinator.com