How do you fix this pricing model loophole? [closed]

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Suppose a SaaS product charges per project, whereby the first project you own is free. Ideally, users would open up a project and invite a few members to work on it. If more projects are needed, the same user within a team would open up another project which then is charged for.

With above restrictions, nothing would stop a team from rotating project ownership to make use of the free project per user, effectively gaining n free projects for a team size of n members.

What criteria could you use to detect such a scenario and how could you fix it?

Things I've thought of

• You can only be member of at most one "free" project. That's hard to enforce because you can't really label any project "free" or "paid" if you charge for n-1 projects. Which one is the "free" one?
• Reserve certain permissions for the project owner only. That's not feasible either because in the context of large organisations, there should probably be multiple members with full access.

Answer 1

Change the model to "one free project per organization". Apparantly that is what you really want, and the identity of organizations can be checked to some degree of certainty by things like tax ID, official website/URL and similar properties.

For individuals who don't want to register to your service as an organization, you may offer to use your service with just one member (themselves) per project, or with a very limited number of users per project. It depends on the precise nature of the service how useful or sensible this is.

Moreover, you should primarily protect yourself against abuse of the pricing model legally, by writing this into your "terms of service". Technical measures should be only supporting this. So even if someone finds a technical loophole, they will probably hesitate to make use of it because of the risk of getting excluded from your service or getting sued.

Answer 2

First of all maybe it's nothing wrong with your pricing model.

Considering that you are offering a "free trial" like every other SaaS out there, I don't see anything wrong. Any SaaS can have this issue where they could theoretically create infinte accounts just to get unlimited free service.

That's not how business is done with this type of thinking. Don't think about this from a mathematical point of view. think of it from a social point of view. Add different kind of constraints to keep the good customers in.

Constraints similar to what @Doc Brown said. Ask them for CC data, or ask them to give you a call (many ask for a call to give the customer a quote), ask for identitification (company details or whatever), ask them to verify the phone number and send them a code for a free project. In my opinion you should put "social/marketing" type of constraints for this. You can even put some kind of firewall and monitor abuse of the free part of your service.

There are plenty SaaS platforms out there from which you can get some inspiration. Steal the ideas from the big SaaS platforms out there. Their marketing team surely knows many things, tried and tested strategies.