The cost of a banned account

The question I get after somebody loses an account is always the same one. What does a replacement cost. I have never once been asked what the dead one was worth.

That gap is where most bad isolation decisions come from. The spend side of the equation gets priced to the cent, because it turns up as an invoice every month and you can see it leave. The loss side stays blank, because nobody sends you a bill for it. Then people run the sums and act surprised when the sums keep telling them to spend less.

So here is the whole ledger, itemised, in the order the items actually reach you.

What you can put on an invoice

Three of the things you lost have prices on them.

The account itself is the cheapest by a distance. You make a fresh one in ten minutes or you buy one for a few dollars from somebody producing them in bulk. Whatever the going figure is on your platform, it is small enough that people quote it from memory without checking. That is the number everyone writes down, and it covers roughly the cardboard the thing arrived in.

The identity underneath it costs more. Every account sits on a phone number and a mailbox, and both go down with it. If the number was a real SIM, that is a recurring bill you have already been paying, now welded to something dead and to whatever else you ever put on it. If it was a rental, you buy another and the new one arrives with no history on that platform whatsoever. The mailbox looks free until you notice that a two year old mailbox with real mail in it is a different asset from one you create this afternoon, and the afternoon one is what the replacement gets.

Then the proxy months, which is the line people refuse to count because nothing visibly broke. The line still works. You did not lose the line. What you lost is every month you already paid into it while it was carrying that account.

A dedicated mobile line costs me about ten dollars a month for the SIM, plus roughly a dollar fifty a month once you spread the modem across its working life. Retail sits above my cost, obviously. Take a line that has carried one account for eleven months and there is a couple of hundred dollars of spend sitting behind an account that no longer exists.

You have two options at that point and neither refunds you. Move the line onto a new account and you inherit its history, which now has a termination in the middle of it. Retire the line and you write the months off directly.

The line with no invoice

Now the item that is usually larger than those three put together.

The account was old.

Age here is a record, and it is worth being specific about what sits in it. How long the account has existed. How consistently it behaved. How many uneventful days are stacked behind it. Who it dealt with. What it had already been allowed to do without anyone stepping in.

That record is the difference between an account that completes an action and an identical account that gets stopped and asked to prove something, on the same day, doing the same thing.

There is a market in aged accounts and I have written elsewhere about why the history you buy there comes with somebody else’s problems attached. It does not fix this. What you lost was that account’s own record, with that platform, under your hands. No amount of money produces another one this month.

Which gives this line a property nothing else on the page has. It is the largest item and the only one you cannot pay to repair. Everything above it is a purchase order.

The two costs that turn up late

That ledger is what you lose on the day. Two more arrive afterwards, and both get priced at zero by almost everybody.

The first is the audit. When an account dies you have to work out what else is exposed: which other accounts share that recovery mailbox, which share the number, which were paid for with the same card, which sat behind the same exit IP or lived on the same handset in the rack.

Keep a written record of your fleet and that job is twenty minutes of reading. Skip the record and it is most of a day, and you finish it unsure, which is worse than the day was. Either way, the ban did not create that cost. It forwarded you the bill for however you had been keeping records beforehand.

The card is the ugly entry in that list. You cannot rotate it in an afternoon the way you can swap an exit. It stays the same string of digits on both sides for as long as it takes to get a new one issued.

The second late cost is the recovery attempt, and this is where people lose the second account.

Recovery runs on the same identifiers as everything else: a number, a mailbox, a device, a card, a network. Filing points attention at exactly those identifiers. Meanwhile you are standing up a replacement, because you still have work to do, and the fastest way to do that is with the recovery mailbox already sitting in your password manager. That mailbox is now attached to both records at the moment somebody is reading one of them.

A recovery attempt has a real expected cost, and it is some fraction of a second account. I cannot tell you what fraction, and I distrust anybody who quotes one. I can tell you that pricing it at zero is how one loss becomes two.

Why the arithmetic always says do not spend

The error lives in the comparison rather than in the arithmetic.

People hold a recurring cost up against the cheapest item on the loss ledger. A dedicated line is tens of dollars a month, forever. A replacement account is a few dollars, once. Put those two next to each other and the answer comes out the same every time.

The comparison that means anything is the recurring cost against the whole ledger, including the part with no price on it, weighted by how often you honestly think this lands on you in a year. You do not need to be accurate. You need to stop comparing against the packaging.

There is a timing effect keeping the mistake alive too. The cheap parts of the bill arrive immediately and feel like money leaving your hand. The expensive parts arrive over the following months with no labels attached: a day lost to an audit in a week you were already behind, a second account gone a fortnight later and filed under bad luck. So the memory that forms is the cheap one, and a year on people will quote you the price of the replacement, because that was the only piece that ever showed up as a payment.

Where the money belongs

Plainly, and I am aware how it sounds coming from somebody who sells lines.

For anyone running accounts that are meant to last, one more proxy line is cheaper than one more banned account. It is not close. The line costs tens of dollars a month and you can stop paying it whenever you like. The account, if it had any age on it, is the one item on the list that money does not reach.

The people who disagree with me are, with very few exceptions, people whose oldest account is four months old. I do not say that to be rude. The disagreement resolves itself without any help from me, and I would rather it resolved for you before the event instead of after it.

Where this argument breaks

Two places, and the first is me. I sell proxy lines. Weigh the argument knowing that, and check whether it would still convince you coming from somebody with nothing to sell you.

The second cuts against the whole piece. All of the above collapses for accounts with a short designed life. If an account exists to do one job over three weeks and then be discarded, its age component is close to zero and so is its loss. Cheap and shared is the correct answer for those. I have watched people spend more isolating disposables than the disposables ever returned to them, which is the same mistake running backwards, and it costs just as much. It is only quieter about it.

So the rule is that spend follows age. An account you expect to still have in two years deserves its own everything. One with a three week lifespan does not, and treating them the same wastes money at both ends at once.

The number I will not give you

I cannot tell you what a two year old account is worth. It depends entirely on what it does for you, and anybody handing you a per account lifetime figure has invented it. I have seen those numbers in slide decks. They come from nowhere.

What I can say is which line on the page is the largest, and that it is the one with no invoice attached to it. Every operator I know who has been through this once starts spending differently afterwards, and not one of them can show you the spreadsheet that changed their mind. There was never a spreadsheet.

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