What Do Fake Signups Cost You

Fake signups cost you in three ways that compound over a year: wasted email spend on addresses that will never convert, wasted support and onboarding time, and, if you give every new signup a free trial workspace, wasted trial infrastructure. For a typical funnel of 5,000 monthly signups with 8 percent disposable or fake (about 4,800 fake signups a year), that adds up to roughly $16,312 a year: $312 in wasted email spend and $16,000 in wasted support time. Enter your own numbers in the calculator above to see your business's real figure.

It varies by audience and by how much incentive there is to abuse a free trial or referral offer, but 5 to 10 percent disposable or fake signups is a typical range for a public signup form with no email verification. A product with a strong trial-abuse incentive (a generous free tier, a paid referral bonus) tends to sit at the higher end of that range.

A disposable or fake address still gets added to your mailing list, so you keep paying to email it every month even though it will never open, click, or convert, and it stays there accumulating cost as more of the same arrive each month. A high volume of dead addresses also damages your sender reputation, which can hurt deliverability to your real subscribers. Beyond email, every fake signup that reaches a support queue or an onboarding flow costs staff time, and every fake signup that claims a free trial workspace costs real compute and storage for an account that was never going to become a customer.

Check the email address right at the signup form, before the account is created, rather than cleaning up the mailing list afterward. IsItDisposable returns a verdict with one Application Programming Interface (API) call or its drop-in JavaScript snippet, fast enough to run inline as someone types, and it fails open: if the check itself is ever unavailable, the form still lets the signup through rather than blocking a real customer.