Visit almost any deliverability tool in 2026 and the first screen is the same: a polite form asking for your email before you can see any result. Sometimes it is framed as "save your report". Sometimes it is just a login wall. The answer from the vendor is always the same: a signup funnel is the point of the free tier.
We do not do that. You paste your domain or your HTML, you get your result. No email, no credit card, no "verify your inbox before you can see your DNS". It is the first thing every new user notices, and it is a deliberate product decision. The reasoning is below, and the business math is more interesting than the standard story suggests.
The standard playbook
Run a free tool → capture an email → drop the user into a drip campaign → some percentage upgrade to the paid plan. This has been the dominant SaaS playbook since about 2012. It works well enough that almost nobody questions it. The free tier exists primarily to fill the list.
The playbook has three assumptions that all need to hold:
- The user's email is worth capturing (they are in the ICP).
- Drip sequences convert well enough to justify the top-of-funnel friction.
- The friction does not cost more signups than the drip sequence recovers.
For most SaaS tools those assumptions are roughly true. For a deliverability tool aimed at developers, they are not.
Why it is wrong for this tool
The user running a placement test is usually one of three people:
- A developer debugging a transactional-email bug, with two browser tabs and a production incident open.
- A growth engineer checking a cold-outreach domain before a launch.
- A consultant producing a deliverability report for a client, under time pressure.
None of those people want another marketing email. All three have spam filters that will send our drip sequence straight to the Promotions tab — ironically, exactly the placement the tool is designed to help them avoid. The email we capture is worth nearly zero in conversion terms, and the friction of the signup costs us a significant share of the exact users we most want: the ones who might integrate our API.
A deliverability tool that gates itself behind email verification will send that verification to the same inbox the user is trying to debug. If the tool actually works as advertised, the verification email lands in Spam. You have built a funnel that trains the user to distrust your product.
The funnel math
The simple story is "no signup = lower conversion". The full story is different.
With a gated free tier: 100 visits → 25 signups → 5 drip-sequence reads → 0.2 paid conversions. Lots of emails captured. Paid conversion rate from the anonymous visitor: 0.2%.
With an ungated free tier: 100 visits → 60 tests run → 6 users integrate the API for automation → 1.5 paid conversions. Zero emails captured. Paid conversion rate: 1.5%.
The numbers are illustrative, not audited, but the shape is consistent with our actual data. The ungated path converts an order of magnitude better because the qualifying event is not an email address — it is a successful test. A user who sees a useful result is pre-sold on the product. A user who traded their email for a drip sequence is not.
What we give up
Honest accounting of the cost:
- No top-of-funnel email list. We cannot re-market. We cannot send a newsletter to visitors who did not come back.
- No attribution of anonymous users. We see a test was run, we do not know who ran it.
- No referral loop. Without an account, we cannot offer referral credits or share-a-test viral loops.
Those are real costs. They are smaller than the benefits, but they are not zero. A bigger company with more traffic might make a different call.
What we gain
- Organic virality. A tool with no signup gets shared on HN, Reddit and developer Slacks in a way a gated tool never does. "Free, no signup" is a headline; "free trial" is not.
- Trust. Developers notice the absence of an email field. It signals that the product is confident in its value without needing to lock the door.
- Lower support load. We do not answer "why do you need my email?" support tickets. We do not chase password resets.
- Clean inbox reputation. We do not send marketing email, so our domain is not in anyone's Promotions folder. The day we do need to email customers, the email lands.
The MCP and A2A bet
Here is the strategic bit. A developer who trusts a tool once is a developer who will reach for it again when they wire an agent into MCP. The agent ecosystem rewards tools that are friction-free to integrate. We think the MCP and A2A flywheel will dominate the market in 12–24 months, and the winning vendors will be the ones with the highest developer trust going into it.
A gated free tier burns that trust to fill a list the developer unsubscribes from a week later. An ungated free tier stores that trust until the day the developer's agent needs a deliverability capability — at which point our MCP server is already familiar.
This is not a universal rule. Gated free tiers work for consumer products where the user is the product, for tools whose value comes from team collaboration and therefore needs an account, and for anything that stores user data across sessions. A single-shot diagnostic tool is almost the worst possible fit for a gated model. Your product may be different.
A fair counterpoint
The ungated model does have one real weakness: abuse. Anonymous usage is harder to rate-limit intelligently. We mitigate with per-IP caps and adaptive challenges when we see automated patterns. It is not perfect — occasionally we tighten limits for a few hours when a scraper hits us. But it is cheaper than the alternative, which is making the 99% legitimate users pay for the 1% abusive ones with a login wall.