About Dregs

Dregs is a fraud detection and abuse prevention platform, built especially for SaaS applications. It gives SaaS operators the upper hand against what we call the dregs of internet society, whose kind you've no doubt encountered if you've run a SaaS for any length of time.

These "dregs of internet society" are badly behaved humans and bots who abuse your free trials, create duplicate accounts for nefarious purposes, cram your user table full of fake signups, game your referral programs, and even outright attack your systems and bother your legitimate users.

Running a SaaS these days has come to mean spending a decent chunk of your time and operating budget (and your team's morale) locked in a game of endless whack-a-mole with these unscrupulous characters.

The Dregs Origin Story

Andy Hawkes founded Dregs after years of fighting SaaS abusers over at Loadster, his other company.

After dealing with the same abuse patterns over and over and trying the usual piecemeal defenses against them, only to still see determined humans and the occasional bot get through all too often, it became clear that sorting out the good users from the troublemakers really boils down to four main questions:

• Is this actually a human?
• Is the profile data authentic?
• Is this the only account for this identity?
• Is this identity behaving like we want our users to behave?

These four questions ended up being the inspiration for the four main scores in Dregs: Humanity, Authenticity, Uniqueness, and Behavior.

In short, Dregs ingests your SaaS event data (the same events you send to your analytics tool like Mixpanel, PostHog, or Google Analytics) and continuously scores each user on each dimension on a scale from 0-100. Your application receives these scores and can use them to make quick decisions about each identity that visits your application: bot or human, authentic or fake, unique or duplicate, well-mannered or ill-behaved.

Why Another Tool

There are plenty of other solutions that deal with fraud and abuse, but they typically just deal with one or two dimensions of it. Simply detecting and banning bots protects against certain types of attacks, but also has its downsides — after all, many bots are good these days! Browser fingerprinting can tell you if the user's device is unique, but can often be bypassed if that's your only line of defense.

Andy created the Dregs platform because he thought it would be easy, and because none of the other solutions out there gives the full picture of every user's Humanity, Authenticity, Uniqueness, and Behavior in real time. Doing so reliably in code takes a surprising amount of engineering effort — we can say that from experience — and it presents many nontrivial edge cases.

Now that Dregs exists, an easy integration gives you continuous, near-instant scoring of each user along all four dimensions, so your app can quickly ban the worst abusers or quarantine suspicious actors with full autonomy.