Lenny RachitskyHost of Lenny's Podcast | Author of Lenny's Newsletter

The Product Pass nightmare

15 Mar 2026 · 1 min

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Lenny Rachitsky's Product Pass subscription, which gave free premium tool access to newsletter subscribers, got hit by fraudsters who exploited API vulnerabilities to steal accounts. He had to scramble with Stripe and Substack to shut it down, coordinating with five partner companies while facing potential financial losses and brand damage.

Chapters

So I have this product pass. So as a subscriber to my newsletter, you get 23 incredible products. I had a launch about a year ago where I launched, you get a free year of Cursor and Lovable and Bolt and Replit and v0. That was way too good an offer. People came for it, bad people. So I just had so many fraudsters trying to find ways to steal all these free goodies. So they set up all these crazy attacks and I had to work with Stripe and Substack to just like shut 'em down. And they just found all these little exploits in our API that we So it was like such a nightmare. So that was extremely stressful because I'm working with all these partners, like Cursor gave us all these free accounts to give out. And if bad guys steal them, that's really bad. That's like a lot of money that they're losing and hurts our reputation. It could trickle down into the whole thing falling apart if everyone's like, oh my God, can't trust Lenny anymore.