Ask HN: Allow multiple free accounts? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Allow multiple free accounts?

13 pointsspencerfry17 comments

I want to keep this beneficial for everyone, so I won’t go into too much specific detail. Basically, we have two plans (the limited free plan) and then the paid plan. The free plan limits the # of images and projects a person can upload; the paid plan lifts many of those restrictions.

The problem is that a lot of people, at least a few thousand, have multiple accounts -- I’ve even seen a few people with three -- and this obviously means that they’re choosing to spread their files across multiple accounts rather than upgrading to the paid account. Now we have enough data from tracking IPs, etc., that we could go in and shutdown the multiple accounts and even stop duplicate IPs from signing up for another account, but the question is… should we?

Is it worth pissing off a few thousand people, but maybe convincing a few hundred to sign up for the paid plan? What would you do in this situation? Should we just let it slide and chalk it up to “at least they’re happy and probably telling their friends” or do something about it?

Tread carefully; in some cases it might legitimately be two users behind the same NAT or on the same computer.

Or, people whose main motivation isn't avoiding the payment but getting some other benefit -- two identities? -- from two accounts. In which case, making sure a single paid account has the same benefits could help.

If you start to crack down, you might want to mix it with a bump-up in free quotas. "Even as we are more generous with our free accounts, we need heavy users to subscribe..."

It also sounds like the population is large enough to try some A/B approaches to get them to sign up -- more steps in logout/login (if they're using a single browser), an option to merge accounts, interstitial upgrade appeals, etc.

http://ryepup.unwashedmeme.com/blog/2009/07/15/howto-start-u...
That's why you have cookies. Session identification; IP + cookie + url-rewriting + timeout.

A few thousand out of 133,000 isn't a huge percentage. I would say that is bound to happen statistically, and you wouldn't want to divert resources to addressing it unless it was a significant percentage of your overall. Chances are those people who are willing to go to the effort to maintain multiple accounts wouldn't pay anyway.

> A few thousand out of 133,000 isn't a huge percentage.
Also, how many of those multiple accounts are actually using all of their accounts ? I can easily imagine people creating second account after they played around with the service using a throw-away account, and then actually liked it enough to create a 'real' account.

i would try to display a polite message through the site to those specific users that makes it clear you know they are using multiple accounts and that your "cheap paid plans can easily be purchased [here]" or something. guilt them into it, but don't cut them off.

I think something like this might work actually. Keep it super polite and guilt trip them. "I see you've got two accounts, you know you're missing out on features X, Y, and Z unless you upgrade one plan."

For what it's worth, this would've not worked on me if there were some uber-useful service that would've not wanted to pay for.
I would simply put IP and email-based duplicity checks in place and would leave existing multiple accounts alone. This should work just fine.

Artificial scarcity is a hard businessmodel to make work for the die-hard freeloaders.
You'll lose a bunch of them but they were not your best users anyway.
I've always tried to really differentiate the offerings between the 'free' and the 'paid' parts of the site so that multiple free accounts would not give you more than what you had when you had a single one.
But for artificial scarcity that does not work.
Isn't there some other metric where you can tighten the bolts without a simple workaround by your users ? Speed ?

There's differentiation between our two plans -- and more in the works -- but the "base" feature of being able to upload files (images and video) has to be on both plans. I think what you're getting at is the correct approach, though, and that's to continue to work on distinguishing the two.

Is it possible that they're creating multiple accounts so that they can show different portfolios to different types of clients? I'm curious if this might be a workaround a missing feature instead of just trying to get by quotas.
(Perhaps you already support this, I just quickly played with the demo and didn't see it. If you don't offer it, it might make a nice feature to offer for paid accounts.)

Yeah, I think that's what is happening. We offer 5 projects for the free plan, which should be enough to show off your illustrations AND your photographs, but it seems as if some people want all or none.
We do allow people to hide projects, so if you just want to show off your illustrations you can do that by hiding your photographs, but still doesn't really combat people from wanting BOTH online at once.
...there's definitely some missing feature there, though, it's just not clear what it is.

From the demo, it looks like you provide a subdomain per user. If that's correct, maybe you could allow paid users to assign a different subdomain to each project?
Have you talked to any of the users doing this sort of thing? Asking why they're doing something will probably point you in the direction of the feature far better than a comment thread on HN.

1 IP != 1 user.
Even if it is always the same for the same user it could be that they're behind a NAT or just simply sharing a PC.
Being behind a NAT myself I have a lot of problems with websites discriminating by IPs.

You should budget for your free service under the assumption that people will create multiple accounts. Then you should allow merging multiple free accounts into one paid account to provide a tempting upgrade path for multiple-account people, who after all are among your most dedicated users. If you can detect multiple-account people then you can advertise the account-combining feature to them directly.

An interesting tangential question would be:
How do you disallow multiple accounts if you really don't want them at all? I.e. I have a multiplayer game and I really don't want users to have multiple accounts because it might spoil the game experience. How do I disallow multiple accounts?

A subscription pay wall would give the most noticeable drop in duplicate accounts. As long as your service is free and account creation is simple (which it should be), you'll get duplicates if there's incentive to do so.
Things you can check if you want to prevent dupes: (But be aware that some of these can and do target legit users)
- IP checks - Browser Cookies (if same value for multiple users) - Flash Cookies (same principle) - E-mail - System-specific metrics (if you're running native code)

The real question is, how do you know they are using multiple accounts unless you are invading their privacy and looking at their private data stored on your servers?

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