How RecentReborn stopped free trial abuse and turned blocked users into paying customers with Fingerprint
Use Case
New Account Fraud / Free Trial Abuse
Industry
Social Media Tools / SaaS
Company Size
Startup
Region
Global
Ready to stop free trial abuse before it starts?
The company: Real-time content discovery for social platforms
RecentReborn gives users a feature that Instagram and YouTube used to offer but have since removed: the ability to search a hashtag or query and see content the moment it's posted.
Businesses use it to find and engage people posting about their brand or location in real time, growing followers and awareness. Others use it purely for content discovery — one customer with several million followers sources supercar photos through the platform and reposts them to their own audience.
Founded and run by Felix Melchner, RecentReborn serves users worldwide, from the United States to India, Pakistan, South Korea, and Morocco.
The challenge: Free users cycling through fake accounts to dodge the daily quota
RecentReborn's free tier caps users at a set number of searches per day. That limit created an incentive to get around it: users would register multiple email addresses and spin up multiple accounts, stacking free quotas instead of paying for more searches.
The team tried to catch this manually: cross-checking IP addresses, watching for repeated hashtag searches across accounts, and flagging suspicious log-out/log-in patterns. It worked, to a point, but it was slow.
"Every day we were spending some minutes or even half an hour checking, removing users," Felix said.
The abuse was also suppressing revenue, since users cycling through free accounts had no reason to ever upgrade to a paid plan.
Fingerprint was the most automated way and the most reliable way to [identify abuse]. Once we implemented it, we just let it run. There was no manual checking anymore.
The solution: Device intelligence, running automatically in the background
RecentReborn evaluated Fingerprint alongside one other competitor early in its search, but found Fingerprint faster to implement and more reliable for the job. The team integrated it themselves, with what Felix described as a smooth rollout and no major hiccups.
Now, when someone tries to register a new account from a device or browser already tied to an existing free account, Fingerprint flags the match instantly. The user is blocked and shown a message asking them to log back into their original account instead.
"Fingerprint was the most automated way and the most reliable way to [identify abuse]. Once we implemented it, we just let it run. There was no manual checking anymore." — Felix said.
The impact: Less manual work, more paying customers
Cutting off multi-accounting had two immediate effects for RecentReborn:
- Time back for the team. The daily manual review process to hunt down and remove duplicate accounts went away entirely.
- A direct lift in revenue. Users who hit the wall on their blocked free account and couldn't simply create another one started converting to paid plans instead.
"We see an impact on the revenue," Felix said. "Users whose account was blocked later then sign up to a paid tier."
Since implementing Fingerprint, RecentReborn has identified approximately 1,000 fraudulent accounts, or roughly 5-6 accounts per day.
Why it matters: Fraud prevention that pays for itself
For a small, lean team, the appeal of Fingerprint was stopping the abuse without adding headcount or another manual process.
"It has been really great," Felix said. "It saved us a lot of time, and it seems to be quite reliable exactly for the use case we have."
Want to see what kind of impact this could have on your free-to-paid conversion? Create a free account or talk to our team.
