What if everyone currently using your service through someone else's account, suddenly got their own paid account tomorrow? Or what if your corporate customers paid for all the seats they're using rather than sharing passwords?

Would your website crash trying to process all the credit cards? And would that add tens of thousands of dollars in ARR to your books? Or even billions?

Here's the thing: Just like death and taxes, account sharing happens. Some of it is hard to stop. But there are key things you can do to reduce it -- and increase your revenue.

And no, it doesn't mean you need to aggressively crackdown on your current customers by limiting their access or asking for additional verification every time they sign in. Instead, it involves coming up with an intentional strategy for reducing account sharing and increasing your paying customers. One that's integrated with things like your pricing structure, product UI, product design, and your marketing strategy.

But, more than anything, it's about understanding why account sharing happens and how to make it in users' best interest not to share accounts.

In a perfect world, referral programs work seamlessly. You create a deal to tempt your users to refer their friends or professional contacts, and then magically gain additional users and sales. Often at a much lower customer acquisition cost than you pay via other marketing and sales channels.

But the world isn't perfect. Just ask one retailer who instituted a give $10, get $10 referral program and had current customers self-refer to the tune of a loss of over $1 million in one day.

While many large companies have built their success on the backs of their referral programs, companies have to be strategic about how they run them as a badly designed referral program can cost companies a lot of money. There are also all sorts of ways customers can potentially commit what some call 'referral fraud.'

The goal should be to design your referral program so that it helps both your customers AND your business, instead of incentivizing people to do things that will just help them. Well-designed referral programs put you and your customers on the same team!

Ever think about making a new account to catch the last episode of a show after your free trial has run out?

Well you aren't alone.

Signing up multiple times to get repeated free trials is one example of what we call multi-accounting. You can learn more about how users are taking advantage of your free trials in our article; "How your one week free trial is being used for three months".

While your user growth and funnel metrics may look good if every user creates multiple accounts for repeat free trials; multi-accounting can be damaging to your business. There can be substantial financial cost, degraded user experience or compliance implications associated with this behaviour. It can also impact your ability to accurately measure life time value (LTV) and customer acquisition cost (CAC) and make informed decisions about your user acquisition spend.

Repeat trialers can be a huge growth opportunity for your business when handled correctly. We have put together some guidelines and best practices to help your business convert as many of them as possible into happily paying customers.

If you could increase the conversion rate of your free trials by 10%, how much of a difference would that make? For most companies, even a 5% boost in their trial-to-paid conversion rate would transform their business.

The problem is figuring out how to do that. What defaults should you use? How should you design your trials? There are so many small decisions that can make a big impact.

To help, we created a cheat sheet on how to offer an effective free trial so you don't have to A/B test until you're sick of hearing the first two letters of the alphabet.

Since free trials have existed, people have been trying to use them to get services for free. Outside of Twitter most people don't talk about how they misuse free trials, so let's dive into the most common ways people try to get multiple free trials.

Having an online business can be very rewarding, you can help people all around the world. It’s not always easy though, you need to accept credit card payments which sometimes lead to chargebacks which hurt your revenue, take up time and also impact your reputation with your payment processor.

What is account sharing?

Account sharing is giving someone access to an account that they are not the owner of, often by sharing login credentials.

Common examples of account sharing are families sharing a Netflix or streaming service account and entire businesses sharing access to a business email or productivity tool

Firebase Auth is a great tool to add account management to your app or service. It takes care of the myriad of ways people like to login.

However, Firebase can't tell you anything about the people behind those accounts. It can't tell you if Bob creates a new account every month so he can get the free trial again and again. It also can’t tell you that Peter and Patsy have created one account and share the password so they only have to pay once.

Human generosity is amazing to witness, and we are taught to share from our early childhood. So it is no wonder that behind a single-user paid account you will often find a couple, a group of friends or even an office full of colleagues!

Everyone loves getting something for nothing, which is why free credits or 30 day trials are so effective at bringing in customers. However, the love of something free can entice users to simply sign up again rather than become a paying customer.