Fake Signups Are Costing SaaS Companies More Than You Think
OnSefy Team
Jul 8, 2025
When you’re scaling a SaaS product, every new signup feels like progress. More users mean more growth, more data, more revenue—right?
Not always.
Behind the signup form, a quiet and costly threat is growing: fake accounts.
Whether created by bots, spammers, or fraudsters, fake signups are not just annoying—they’re expensive, misleading, and dangerous. For many SaaS companies, they silently erode growth, inflate costs, and distort reality.
🎭 What Counts as a Fake Signup?
- Bot-generated accounts to test systems or abuse free trials
- Disposable email users that vanish after onboarding
- Scripted signups for phishing, scraping, or brute-force attacks
- Stolen identity users trying to bypass bans or impersonate others
They may look like normal users at first—but they’re far from it.
💸 The Real Cost of Fake Users
Fake signups don’t just hurt your conversion rate. They affect nearly every corner of your SaaS business:
1. Burning Resources
Every new user triggers a cascade of actions—welcome emails, onboarding flows, CRM entries, database writes, storage, and server load.
With fake users:
- You’re spending money onboarding nobody.
- You’re inflating your email costs with dead inboxes.
- Your servers are working harder for zero ROI.
2. Corrupted Analytics
How do you measure:
- Trial-to-paid conversions?
- Onboarding drop-off?
- Engagement rates?
Fake signups throw all of these off. Teams end up making product and marketing decisions based on data that isn’t real.
3. Damaged Brand Trust
Fake users can use your SaaS platform to:
- Spam other real users
- Abuse your free features
- Trigger false reports or bans
One bad experience caused by a fraudulent account can make a real customer walk away—for good.
4. Stolen Time
Sales teams chasing fake leads. Support reps answering bot-generated tickets. Engineers patching holes left by exploit attempts.
Time spent on fake users is time lost from growing the real business.
📉 Vanity Metrics ≠ Real Growth
You might see 1,000 new signups a week, but how many of those are:
- Using real emails?
- Logging in more than once?
- Showing any real intent?
If you’re tracking growth by signup count alone, you may be celebrating noise instead of value.
🔐 The Solution: Block Fraud at the Source
Prevention is better than cleanup. The only way to win against fake signups is to stop them before they get in.
That’s why SaaS platforms are turning to fraud prevention services that analyze signups in real-time—flagging risky behavior, detecting fake emails and proxies, and scoring each user before they’re allowed in.
🛡️ Meet OnSefy
OnSefy is an advanced fraud detection service built for modern SaaS platforms. It works at the point of signup to help you:
✅ Block bots and trial abusers
✅ Detect disposable emails and risky IPs
✅ Score users by trustworthiness
✅ Keep your analytics clean and meaningful
With simple integration (REST API, JS snippet, or backend SDK), OnSefy protects your onboarding flow without adding friction for real users.
🚀 Real Growth Starts with Real Users
You built your SaaS to help real customers—not bots, not spam accounts.
Every fake signup you block is time and money saved, and a clearer path to true growth.
Start protecting your platform today.
👉 Explore OnSefy and stop fake signups before they start.