[TimLeland]

I can really relate to this article! I created T.LY URL Shortener in 2018, and I've encountered all these issues and more! I found out the hard way when my hosting company shut down my servers for malicious content about a week into launching the site. Malicious actors will go to all sorts of lengths to achieve their goals.

Be careful relying on Stripe to prevent these users. Next they will start using stolen credit cards to create accounts then you will face disputes. If you get too many, Stripe will prevent you from processing payments.

About a year ago, I launched a service called Link Shield. It's an API that returns risk scores (0-100) on URLs. It uses AI and other services to score if a URL is malicious. Check it out and let me know if you would be interested in trying it linkshieldapi.com/

[What2159]

Affordable is not a price. I don't want to login before getting pricing.

[hoistbypetard]

This. And related: I don't want to have to try your system in order to get pricing. I've seen that a couple times, particularly for things that are in beta, where you don't even see pricing until the end of the trial period.

Integrating a new system requires some effort. And there are some systems, like the one in question here, where there's a real cap on how much value they could possibly provide for me, even if they're perfect.

If I can't see whether the pricing falls in that range before I need to sign up, I'm just not going to seriously consider it for most services.

[elaus]

This is really one of the worst patterns in the SAAS market.

I don't want to provide my data to multiple services just to be able to compare their prices and find out which one I'm actually gonna use. At first this will lead to countless automated mails from all those "founders" asking why I haven't started paying yet, and if I'm unlucky my credentials end up on haveibeenpwned.com…

[stevenicr]

privacy policy does not address data retention, maybe there is none, I just assume that some data would be collected by an API service

I would not use something like this to send my customer data to the thing to check a link, but if it was something that could be self hosted on my vps and a script to attach wordpress chat system to check with it - maybe..

But with no pricing showing, I am assuming I can't afford it anyhow.