[patio11]

My perspective on this is colored by selling SaaS.

In software sold on a free-trial model, you assume most trials don’t convert (overwhelmingly due to declining to pay but with a bit of fraud) and then the cost to provision the service (COGS) is, effectively, a marketing expense. COGS in SaaS are typically negligible to low; this is why the industry is OK with providing services on, basically, a digital handshake. If you want to allow users to try out high-COGS services (or highly-abused services) prior to verifying capacity/willingness to pay, you’d need some way to credit score potential customers outside the context of a particular payment.

To date, we’ve generally focused the bulk of our ML efforts on things which apply to the majority of our users, but as we get better at customizing these technologies to specific industries at scale and even on a per-account basis, we could certainly imagine applying them in contexts that are more relevant in your model. I’d love to hear more detail about your use case; feel free to email me (my HN username at stripe.com). If we get closer to shipping something that is probably interesting, we’d be happy to give you a heads up.