Free tiers are a double-edged sword. They’re great for onboarding and reducing friction—but also a prime target for abuse. If left unchecked, free plan exploitation can cost real money, corrupt your data, and flood your system with noise.
The Abuse Problem: One Feature, Infinite Exploits
When someone creates a free account, you’re often giving out something valuable:
- Server resources
- Storage space
- Credits or API calls
- Access to customer support
- Usage of AI or high-cost compute
For legitimate users, these are onboarding tools. But for abusers, they’re an opportunity to extract value at scale. Here’s how abuse typically happens:
- A user signs up with a disposable email and consumes the free plan.
- They hit the limit or finish the trial.
- They repeat the process using another temporary phone number.
- If you’re checking for repeat IPs, they rotate through VPNs or proxies.
- Rinse and repeat—sometimes automated.
This creates dozens or hundreds of fake accounts, all funneling resources away from real customers.
Why Traditional Defenses Fall Short
Basic filters like regex email checks or IP rate-limiting aren’t enough. Abuse tools are more sophisticated now:
- Disposable email domains change constantly.
- Virtual phone services can pass SMS verification.
- VPNs can rotate through clean-looking IPs that aren’t yet blacklisted.
Worse, most tools catch abuse after it happens—when resources are already wasted.
How Guardient Stops Free Tier Abuse at the Source
Guardient was built for these exact scenarios. Its API is designed to analyze sign-up attempts in real time, score them based on risk, and return detailed signals so your system can decide what to do next.
Email Integrity Check
Our disposable email database is updated daily and covers over 100,000 known domains. When someone signs up with a temporary address, the API flags it instantly. This stops the most common abuse tactic: using free email services to endlessly register new accounts.
Temporary Phone Number Detection
Guardient analyzes patterns and known ranges used by virtual number providers. These are often used to bypass phone verification systems. By flagging these numbers, you can stop multi-account creation—even if you’re using SMS as a verification layer.
Risky IP Detection
Not all VPN IPs are created equal. Guardient checks IP addresses against a real-time dataset that includes known proxy services, data centers, residential proxies, and even frequently abused IP ranges. This helps block users attempting to spoof location or identity to create duplicate accounts.
Weighted Trust Scoring
The real power comes from how you combine these checks. Guardient lets you assign weights to each factor. For example:
- Email domain risk: 6
- Phone number type: 3
- IP trust score: 5
You define the threshold, and Guardient returns a single trust score per sign-up, along with the breakdown of which signals triggered the result. This gives you full control over how strict you want to be—without hardcoding brittle rules.
You Don’t Need to Kill Your Free Tier—Just Protect It
The goal isn’t to stop sign-ups. It’s to make sure each signup is real. Guardient doesn’t replace your onboarding process—it fortifies it. With just one API call during registration, you gain real-time insights into who’s trying to enter your system and whether you can trust them.
Let your free plan drive growth—not losses.