Devil's advocate: If supplying an email address opens up a 30 day free trial, you can hardly complain when people do supply email addresses... especially when, to smooth the experience, there is absolutely nothing else but a email address field and a "start free trial" button.
People will always find ways to use things to the limit or abuse them. You need to consider where to put the limit to balance user experience vs. preventing abuse.
We'd have to see the ToS, but I'd suspect the lawyer that wrote it didn't say email, they said individual. Further, I suspect there's a clause in there about commercial usage.
Then you need an explicit check box "I have read and accept the T&C" and those T&Cs allow you to block an account, which is often the most effective option against abusers. If you go legal every time someone abuses a free trial you might as well give up free trials.
As things stand there is no point in going legal. Either let it slide or block them and use it for PR with a blog post and an HN submission (wait a minute ;)
> If you go legal every time someone abuses a free trial you might as well give up free trials.
What silly "all or nothing" thinking.
You don't have to "go legal" on every free trial abuse, just the egregious ones. Here we have a company that's been abusing the free trial for 10 years and 1000s of instances. Vates rightfully can claim millions (~40M to be exact) from this instance. The company, in particular, can't claim they didn't know this wasn't allowed because they automated creating fake email accounts to abuse the situation.
It's particularly more egregious because Vates allows companies to build and maintain the software directly without support for free.
Guidelines:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Well, now I’ve seen it — and yes, lesson learned. But here’s the good news about humanity: they’re the only ones abusing it at this scale. So far, it seems most people still choose sanity over spreadsheets of throwaway emails.
Whenever someone asks "but who's gonna do that??" the real world answer is always "Well..." for better or worse ;)