[Nextgrid]

Out of curiosity, what does your service do and how do you know that these users would've paid for the service otherwise? As in with piracy, the argument is that it hurts sales but it's very difficult to determine whether that is really true.

[brightball]

I can't speak for the OP but free trial period abuse is very common.

"Would have paid for the service" vs "Are actively working to use the service without paying for it" are two different things.

I worked for a company that had some free tools on the web, with no published API. Those tools were scraped well above the T&C limitations to be mined by other companies.

We had a "free forever" account that you could use to monitor a single domain. Within the user table there were multiple instances of 20 to 300 (worst case) myaccount+<domain>@mycompanydomain.com trying to abuse the single domain rule without paying for it. In one case, the results were being packaged up to be shown in somebody else's product.

I'm certainly not advocating for spam or selling data (the company I mentioned didn't do this either), but abuse it the more common use case that web businesses deal with. To combat abuse, 90% of the battle is to identify where the abuse is coming from first.

[greenyoda]

If offering "free forever" causes problems, maybe that's too generous? What if it was only free for a couple of weeks - enough time to evaluate the service but not enough time to use it for commercial purposes?