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derwiki

This sort of reason is exactly why I started using one time credit cards (privacy) for new service signups.

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+1 for privacy.com

What you lose in credit card points, you 10X in savings on:

1. Unexpected "recurring" charges and

2. Time spent avoiding unintelligible unsubscribe UXs

Plus, I feel a lot more comfortable trying services that require a credit card for a free trial which has led me to some extra value that I wouldn't have found otherwise. Just set the budget on the card to $1.

Some people might feel bad for all the SaaS companies that are getting failed payment alerts, but I don't. It took a lot of dark patterns and group think to create a market for something like privacy.com.

I'm still waiting on my $600 from Dropbox, which they charged over five years for an inactive account without ever sending a receipt. Never again with privacy.com.

Edit: format/clarify

I think you can probably use PayPal Key for for the same purpose and get the best of both worlds (points + virtual card).

As an owner of a small SaaS business I can say that our payment processor has fairly strict requirements to allow recurring charges:

- Product description has to be very clear that it's a recurring payment

- Terms and conditions have to have a section with details on how to cancel the subscription

- We have to send email notifications in advance before every recurring charge

They were rolling out a free cashback program until recently. Now it's oddly locked behind an overpriced monthly plan.

What do you use to generate the one-time numbers?

I'm guessing @derwiki's parenthetical "(privacy)" is a reference to privacy.com, which is a service for doing exactly that.

Priavcy is the name of the service.

https://privacy.com/

Just for US persons. Are there other services like that for EU?

Any EU alternative for privacy.com or similar services?

Revolut offers virtual and disposable cards. I've been (unethically) using them for these 1GBP / month trials a certain online newspaper offers.

Revolut was featured on HN just this morning: https://thehftguy.com/2020/08/12/a-haven-for-fraud-and-stole...

Guess she should have used a disposable Revolut card then

Most of the banks offer it online as part of the service?

Not all. A major US Bank (rhymes w/ Pace Bank) used to provide this feature back in the 2000s and then rolled it back. I discovered this ~4 months ago when I wanted to buy something online but didn't fully trust the vendor. Then ended up going with Privacy.com.

I'm a huge fan and would def recommend them to anyone looking for better control over subscription charges

CapOne offers that for their credit cards, but it's so clunky and unintuitive that I still wind up using Privacy 90% of the time.

I have a Capital One card and wanted to use that feature. As far as I could tell, the only way to use it was to install their "assistant" browser extension and give it permission to view everything you do. Then if you were on a merchant site it could suggest you use a new card number for it. I considered toggling the assistant on and off just as needed but instead said nope. Was there another way to do it?

Totally bogus, isn’t it? I just did that very thing with CapOne. The only saving grace is that once you create the temp card with their definitely-not-spyware web browser extension, you can uninstall it completely and manage the card through the website. I’ve installed it, visited a single site, and uninstalled it several times so far and it seems to get the job done.

You can give selective access[0] to the extensions in Chrome. The restrictive access is that it will get access to the webpage only when you click the extension. Read under "Let extensions read and change site data"

[0] https://support.google.com/chrome_webstore/answer/2664769?p=...

Apple Card does this (and obviously Apple Pay in general). It's not nearly as powerful as Privacy though since the card numbers can't be cancelled or paused from what I can tell.

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