I have a proposal around trial periods and PPE that could benefit both Apify and developers, with little to no impact on users, while also helping reduce abuse. Rentals are going away, but that does not mean trial periods should disappear too. My proposal is simple: allow trial periods for PPE actors. That way, users can still try an actor before upgrading to a paid plan, but they cannot keep using it for free forever once the trial ends. Example: if an actor has a 1-month trial, users have enough time to understand it, test it, and integrate it into their workflow. But after that, they need to upgrade if they want to continue using it. This also helps with abuse. Right now, if someone wants to exploit an actor, they can create 10 accounts once and get $5 on each one. That is $50 worth of free usage, and they can keep using it every month. With a trial-period model on PPE, that free access would only happen once per account, which makes abuse much harder and less attractive. With this model: - users still get a fair chance to test the actor properly - abuse becomes harder and less attractive - developers are better protected and can start earning sooner - Apify has a better chance of converting users to paid plans after users already got value from the actor The main alternative would be to raise PPE prices for free users, but that feels worse for users, because they will be less willing to spend their limited free credits just to test one actor. So I think trial periods on PPE could be a pretty clean middle ground: still good for users, better for developers, and probably better for Apify too. WDYT? @Lukas Krivka @Ella @Saurav Jain @Matej @ Apify

The free account thing i have seen from youtubers they simply say create another account if you want more results. Sorry for previous reply i misunderstood your point

@Lukas Krivka here

cool thanks 🙂

One metric could be list users that use the same single actor recurringly many consecutive months while staying in the free tier.

The problem is that to test the hypothesis really, we would need to have the trial feature in place 😄 But some approximation would be to make that approximately in code, only allow trying it shortly for less than $5 and then nothing. And see how many free users would upgrade and what would be the negative impact. But it is not fully measurable. You are not able to measure that some free user mentioned after 6 months on Twitter and that generated 2 paying customers.

One metric could be the list of users who repeatedly use the same single actor for many consecutive months while spending less than $5. This is probably something that can be queried from a database. For PPE actors, you can directly sum the amount spent for each user, for a single actor, per month. For Rental actors, you do the same, but instead sum the usage cost and multiply it by a factor such as x3 or x4, for example.