Try out SaaS apps without giving away your email | Hacker News Reader

Try out SaaS apps without giving away your email

1trial.io

1 pointyuvalkarmi12 comments

Hi, I'm Yuval, the founder of 1Trial - a service that lets you try out SaaS apps giving away your email.

You can think about it like a smarter disposable email service that also generates a password for you (and with a better UI).

The cool thing is that unlike disposable email services, it also saves the login info for you for later use.

I made it as a fun side project to scratch my own itch - I like checking out new products, and I was ticked off that to even begin to try something out, you need to register for an account.

The problem I had with disposable email services was that you lost access to your account, and you couldn't keep track of all the different services you signed up for (without polluting your password manager).

Happy to answer questions, and looking forward to engaging with the HN community - I love this place!

Why would one use disposable email adresses for SaaS trials? I have a second emailaddress for this purpose. The only thing I can think of is people looking to create multiple accounts at the same SaaS. So basically a form of abuse.

Something I'm missing here?

That's fair -- one simple answer is privacy: each service you sign up for gets its own email address, but they're all tied to your 1trial account behind the scenes (if you choose to create one - it's optional), so you can still keep track of it.

I bet that the second email address you have can easily be tied to your identity. Same reason Apple Private Relay is useful.

Before I see value in a product, I may not want to give them my actual email address because I may just end up using it once.

I suppose it could be abused, but that's certainly not the intent.

Sorry if it comes out as harsh, but there's nearly 100% chance of this getting abused and then blacklisted by anti-abuse vendors, which will in turn render it 100% useless. That's the path all these disposable services took, including things like Private Relay, Firefox something, etc. Can't have nice things

edit: typo

lol, it does come off as a little harsh, but I do think it's reasonable to expect the main domain to get blacklisted at some point. Assuming there's some business model to figured out for this, alternative domains could always be added... For now I was just curious to put it out there and see how people respond / if it even gets used at all.

Also, did Private Relay actually get blacklisted?

it got at least "detected" and provided as an API for people who query these things, and it does get filtered out as a kind of data center/low reputation IP class. But as with anything of this type, it's up to the client what to do with it. Most disposable infrastructure is not trustworthy for the exact reason that they don't associate an individual with a high-cost profile, i.e. at least a credible/high rep email, or an SMS-authed phone number, and so on.

Of course there's always the argument that, if your revenue relies on defending against free-trial abuse, then maybe your product is not fit for a freemium model in the first place.

case in point + big thread if you're interested in learning more about this stuff https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32917671

For a side project this is a fun solution I would use. For longer term, it's not for me.

The automation part is nice. I appreciate your work.

Thanks for the reply! Do you mind addressing this part? "For longer term, it's not for me." - totally legitimate – I'm just curious why. Feel free to be very honest / harsh :) Honest feedback > me feeling good about this

If I need a disposable email address I need it now. In that moment I am not looking for a solution to manage my trials.

Also I am on the other card in this game. I am thinking about building an api to flag the disposable emails. The solutions out there are not convenient enough. Also in the paid solutions many slip through.

That’s actually super useful. Do you want to chat about this (the other side as you call it). There are open source lists of lacklisted domains and I’m curious why current solutions don’t quite do the trick. If you’re open to chatting please email me at ykarmi (at) gmail

Reply on news.ycombinator.com