Why does every service want you to create an account?

“Why does every service want me to create an account?”

“Why can’t I just book this without signing up?”

“What are they actually doing with my data?”

“Is there a way to use this without giving them everything?”

You open an app. You’re trying to book a haircut, browse a directory, read an article. Sometimes you can look around. Sometimes you’re stopped at the first screen. Most of the time, you can keep going up to a point — and then to actually do the thing, you have to create an account.

Some apps offer a “guest” option. It’s there. It’s also buried — small text, lighter color, off to the side — while the Sign Up button sits big and friendly in the middle of the screen. Three taps in, you’ve made another account just to do what you came to do.

Almost every service that pushes you that way falls into one of three reasons. Sometimes a blend of all three. Once you can spot which is which, you can decide what’s worth giving away.

Reason 1: Investor metrics

The number one reason most tech companies — especially the ones offering booking tools, local directories, or any kind of consumer-facing software — want accounts is for the metrics. Specifically: the metrics they show investors.

Booksy. Vagaro. Mindbody. Every one of those companies has investors who want to see growth. “We have 100 million users” moves the needle. It says: people like this, the product works, the company is winning.

A company that walks into an investor meeting and says “we have 50,000 users six months in” is a good story. So is “we crossed 10 million.” User counts are how tech raises money. Even a useful product gets the same treatment — the user count is the marketing metric, regardless of whether the users are real, active, or doing anything beyond signing up once.

That’s the first reason, and on its own, it isn’t sinister. It’s just a thing investors care about, so the company asks for the account.

Reason 2: Legitimate need

There are absolutely real cases where account creation makes sense.

If a service handles payment processing, they have to protect those gates. If they store personal or medical information, they need authentication. And if you use a service regularly — your haircut every two weeks, your nails every month, your gym membership — having an account means you don’t have to retype your name, address, and credit card every time. You log in, pick your time, and you’re done.

That’s a real benefit. For high-frequency or sensitive services, an account earns its keep.

But here’s the honest version: a lot of services that don’t actually need accounts ask for them anyway. Booking a restaurant, browsing a directory, reading a review, looking at a profile — these don’t require authentication. The free-flow version, where you just do the thing and put your info in once (if at all), works fine for most of them.

So this reason is legitimate sometimes — not universally.

Reason 3: Advertising and the data layer

This is the big one, and it’s the one most companies don’t say out loud.

When you create an account on a “free” service, they collect information. The basics: first name, last name, email, phone, sometimes address.

Many also collect what you don’t see: your IP address, your device fingerprint, your browser, your approximate location, your behavioral patterns, which buttons you tap and how long you linger on a screen. Not every company does this — the ones that do are usually the ones whose business model depends on having that profile to monetize through advertising.

If you also grant push notification permission, they can ping you whenever they want — until you turn the permission off or delete the app. And once they have your email, they can reach you that way until you unsubscribe.

Some of that data stays in-house. A lot of it doesn’t. It feeds the ad ecosystem we wrote about here — the one that tracks you across apps, builds a profile, and sells access to that profile to advertisers.

Facebook is the famous example. In 2019, the FTC fined Meta $5 billion — at the time, the largest privacy-related fine in U.S. history — for violations tied to how they handled user data. They weren’t the only ones. They were just the one that got caught hardest.

Ever wonder why you search for a plumber in one app, and then your social media feed fills up with plumber ads for the next three days? That’s not coincidence. The app you searched in didn’t follow you across the web on its own — what it did was send your activity, usually tagged to your email or phone, to ad platforms like Meta or Google. Those platforms already track you across apps and websites. Once they have your email matched with what you were looking at, the rest happens on their end.

That’s why companies say “we don’t sell your data” — because plenty of them share it instead. Different word, same outcome. Honestly, we don’t share it either. We don’t feed ad networks with your activity, and we don’t match your account against outside platforms. We’re saying it out loud because the bar is so low right now that being clear about it counts for something.

The three reasons, side by side

Most account requests are a blend.

Reason	What it’s for	Is it about you?
Investor metrics	Boosting the user count number	No
Legitimate need	Payments, sensitive data, repeat convenience	Sometimes yes
Advertising / data layer	Building the profile that powers the ads	No

A booking app probably hits all three. A bank or a doctor’s portal is mostly reason 2. A free directory or a news site without a paywall is mostly reasons 1 and 3.

The honest takeaway

You can’t avoid accounts entirely. Some services genuinely need them. The move isn’t to refuse every sign-up — the move is to know which reason you’re paying into when you do.

If the service has a real reason to need your information, fair. If they just want a number on a slide and a profile to sell to advertisers, that’s worth knowing before you hand it over.

The next time something asks you to create an account just to look at it, ask yourself which of the three reasons applies. Most of the time, the honest answer is reasons 1 and 3 — and you’re the product.

Related: Why is everything an ad now? The 2026 ad creep, explained · Why is Google search so bad for finding a local business? · How to find a local service provider you can actually trust