AI companies have created a new category of free trial abuse where up to one in six free trial users are abusive, and Stripe built a system using network-level signals to block thousands of abusers daily.
With AI software having real compute costs, free trial abuse became a serious problem. Stripe leveraged its network data and foundation model to identify and block abusers at scale. ✦ AI generated
Will Gaybrick · a16z Podcast · 2026-08-17 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 2:48
I think it was something like one in six users of free trials were abusive um and so you know you're just throwing money at these you know users who are just signing up for another account another account another account you know maybe even doing model distillation and and and things like that. And so we sort of you know got in the bunker with them and just stood up in a weekend a pipeline where we were able to you know use our foundation model look across the entire Stripe network use our embeddings and then you know after that put a reasoning layer on top of so you could sort of say we think this is a free trial abuser because um and point to those signals. And I think it's today I think it's 11 labs recently told us that they're blocking 2000 free trial abusers per day using stripe signals.
verbatim transcript · starts at 2:48
2:48compute but but it's it's it's it's negligible. It's minimous but now software has a cost structure and so actually I think cursor was the first user that we >> I was going to say it was our portfolio where we exactly experienced it and uh you know I I guess internet users can be crafty but yes >> yes and and I think it was something like one in six users of free trials
3:12were abusive um >> and so you know you're just throwing money at these you know users who are just signing up for another account, another account, another account, you know, maybe even doing model distillation and and and things like that. And so we sort of, you know, got in the bunker with them and just stood up in a weekend a pipeline where we were able to, you know, use our foundation
3:33model, look across the entire Stripe network, use our embeddings, and then, you know, after that put a reasoning layer on top of so you could sort of say we think this is a free trial abuser because um and point to those signals. And I I I I think it's today, I think it's 11 labs recently told us that they're blocking 2,000 free trial abusers per day using
3:56stripe signals. >> Incredible. >> So, you just think about how much money you'd be, you know, burning if you were um you know, well, how much money you wouldn't how how much revenue you wouldn't be creating if you weren't giving these trials, you know, how false positives and the false Yeah, exactly. Exactly. >> And then on the increasing agency side, >> it's still just so hard to go global.
4:15you know, you think about um having to register, calculate, remmit taxes in so many geographies >> and this new crop of AI companies, you know, they're digital goods companies and they want to just, you know, go global very fast. And so I guess, you know, AEFs is a good example. um they're using uh this product strike managed payments where in their home markets you know the US let's say they have an