Design as a service companies, how do you prevent users abusing your service?
I'm brainstorming an idea for a business with a similar model to design as a service.
However, I see there's a risk of customers abusing any unlimited X for $/month offers.
I can see ways of preventing this but I'm interested in hearing from others who run similar services. Do you enforce any hard limits? Have you ever had to turn customers away because they were abusing your service? What measures have you put in place to ensure that customers never require more than a reasonable amount of work per month?
I find your choice of words interesting. As a customer, if I see the word “unlimited,” that has a very clear meaning to me. If I want a kazillion things, I get a kazillion things because it’s unlimited. You aren’t calling the service one that provides a reasonable amount of design for one flat rate, you’re describing it as all the design I want for one monthly price.
I remember the backlash with a cloud storage provider called Bitcasa. They claimed unlimited cloud storage forever and ever, but then that turned into a few gigabytes because they couldn’t make it work from a business model perspective. People bought into Bitcasa because of the word unlimited. When they took that away, all that was left was a crappier, more expensive Dropbox.
Long story short, if you aren’t providing unlimited of something, don’t call it unlimited. You’re being honest with your users and you avoid your problem entirely.
@Vinrob may be able to offer advice.