$2.1M in trial abuse recovered
A B2B project management platform had 3,200 users who had never paid — exploiting residential proxies to reset their 14-day trial indefinitely. Sentinel identified every one of them. Revenue recovery paid for years of Sentinel usage in the first month.
The Company
A B2B project management SaaS with a 14-day free trial and a $299/month Pro plan. Approximately 12,000 paying customers at the time of deployment, growing steadily through product-led growth and inbound marketing.
The Problem
The trial abuse was systematic. A segment of users had identified that resetting browser cookies and using a new IP address through a residential proxy gave them an unlimited free trial. They'd reset, re-register with a new email, and continue using the product — indefinitely, without ever paying.
The team estimated 3,200 "perpetual trial" accounts — users who had been on the platform for 6+ months via repeated trial resets. At $299/month Pro pricing, these accounts represented over $2.1M in recoverable ARR.
The second problem was competitive intelligence scraping. Competitors had deployed residential proxy networks to scrape pricing pages, feature comparisons, customer logos, and case study content at scale — rotating through clean residential IPs to avoid rate limiting.
The Solution
Sentinel was deployed in two places simultaneously:
1. Trial signup gate — every new trial signup is evaluated for proxy/VPN use. If the score exceeds 60, the user is required to provide a card-on-file (not charged) to activate the trial. This doesn't block legitimate users — it just adds friction for the proxy-rotation pattern that made trial abuse economical.
2. API endpoint protection — Sentinel signals are evaluated on key content endpoints (pricing, feature list, customer stories). Requests from known proxy ASNs are rate-limited aggressively and flagged for review. Legitimate users browsing these pages are completely unaffected.
"We knew we had a trial abuse problem but didn't know the scale. Sentinel showed us 3,200 accounts that had been on our platform for months without paying. The revenue recovery paid for years of Sentinel usage in the first month."
— VP of RevenueResults — 6 Months Post-Implementation
Why Trial Conversion Actually Improved
One unexpected result: legitimate trial-to-paid conversion improved from 12% to 19% — a 58% relative improvement. The explanation is straightforward: when perpetual trial accounts are removed from the conversion denominator, the remaining cohort is composed entirely of users who engaged organically and legitimately.
More importantly, the card-on-file requirement for high-risk signups filtered out users who had no intention of ever paying — leaving a trial pool with dramatically higher purchase intent from the start.
The Scraping Problem
The competitor scraping issue was resolved as a side effect of the API protection layer. By evaluating Sentinel signals on key public content pages, the platform could identify and rate-limit scrapers without blocking real visitors. Within the first week, scraper traffic from proxy ASNs dropped by 94%.
This had a secondary benefit: page load performance improved significantly as bot traffic dropped, improving Core Web Vitals scores for organic search.
Implementation Detail
The trial signup gate required a single middleware addition to the Node.js registration endpoint. The card-on-file flow was handled through their existing Stripe integration — no charge is made, but the payment method requirement is sufficient friction to break the trial-reset economic model.
The API endpoint protection layer was implemented as Express middleware that reads Sentinel signals from a lightweight cache layer, avoiding per-request latency overhead on high-traffic content pages.
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