Soft launch: registration limit and waitlist
SilentChat can control new sign-ups with a limit; once it's reached, prospects can join a waitlist. The administrator hands out seats in waves — without reservation, because the limit stays the only gatekeeper.
Why a limit
A new service runs into problems at the start that only real usage reveals. A registration limit caps how many of them arrive at once. In SilentChat it's a setting that can be changed without a deploy. It counts self-registered workspaces; ones created by an administrator don't count. At 0, there is no limit.
Separately, abuse limits apply: at most five sign-ups per IP address and ten per email domain within 24 hours (free email providers excluded), plus a daily cap on new trials.
The waitlist
Once the limit is reached, sign-up shows the waitlist instead of the form. It stores the email address, the language and the time of consent, and the IP address only as a hash. Without the consent checkbox there is no entry. The response is always the same whether the address is new or already listed — so nobody can query who's on the list.
Inviting without reserving
The administrator hands out seats manually in waves: the oldest entries not yet notified receive an email with a sign-up link. No seat is reserved, and the link doesn't expire. That's intentional: the limit stays the only gatekeeper. You can therefore invite more people than there are free seats — whoever comes too late sees the waitlist again.
A trap from testing
The daily trial cap (default 100) cost us an hour of debugging in August. After many test runs in one day, every new workspace got no trial and reported “account suspended, please subscribe” at the next login. The message was correct but useless as a diagnosis: it pointed at the subscription, not at the daily counter.
After the trial
The trial lasts 7 days on the Professional plan, no credit card. It's followed by 7 days of grace with the same limits; anyone who doesn't pick a plan continues on the free plan.
Deletion and retention
Anyone who registers with the same email address is removed from the waitlist at sign-up; the same happens when an account is deleted and anonymised. All other entries have a deadline: without an invitation they are deleted after 12 months, after an invitation 90 days later. A daily cleanup job takes care of that. When the administrator deletes an entry, it is removed for good — the waitlist has no trash. The browser type, which the form recorded at first, has not been stored since 16 September 2026.