It would be a nice to indicate with a small symbol next to each whether you need to give them your credit card details or not.
Nothing that mpv with youtube-dl couldn't solve, but still.
These people have no shame. Frankly, I wonder how far they will go.
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/10070779#zippy=%2C...
But let's also not forget that Google is (was?) parsing your banking info from your emails with transactions and purchases, and there wasn't even any option to turn it off.
This allows you to get around the credit card wall, without fear of them actually being able to charge the card.
I also use this trick for any annual membership type things. I will put in a virtual card number to pay the annual fee, then after they charge the fee I will deactivate that virtual card (but not delete it). Now if a year from now they charge the card without warning me, it will decline. They usually send you an email saying it declined, at which point you can either leave that card deactivated and you now easily cancelled the service, or you want to keep the service you can go and activate that card back up and the next time they try to charge the card again (usually 48 hours later or so) it will go through.
If anyone knows of other ways to create virtual cards, please let me know. I am currently using Capital One's virtual cards because 1) it is free if you have a Capital One credit card, 2) it allows unlimited virtual cards, 3) their browser extension is actually really slick at auto-generating cards and filling in the card numbers for you. I have looked into Privacy.com which actually offers a lot more granular control over your virtual cards. But you have to pay monthly for the service and get a limited number of cards, so I stick with Capital One. I have a Capital One card that I don't use for anything other than online subscriptions and virtual cards. But I would love to know if there are other options out there that I could consider.
privacy.com (https://privacy.com, or If you want to use a referral, privacy.com/join/NPNDJ ) is also free and works across any bank/debit card, although just recently they started monetizing by limiting free accounts to creating 12 virtual cards a month, so if you need more it's $10/mo.
> This allows you to get around the credit card wall, without fear of them actually being able to charge the card.
Note that services can see if a card is virtual and might block them from signing up for free trials. Digital Ocean, for example, does this to prevent referral fraud. Netflix also used to block virtual cards from signing up for the free trial when they had one.
0: https://stripe.com/docs/api/payment_methods/object#payment_m...
1: https://developers.braintreepayments.com/reference/response/...
It's not clear to me what you mean here: do you suggest SaaS businesses should reject those customers who prefer paying with prepaid cards? Hello, this is me! When I see a prepayment option or even Paypal, I gladly pay, but when you want my credit card info, I wave you good bye!
Not the parent, but: yes, absolutely. Prepaid cards are for making one-time payments. They are not suitable for setting up ongoing subscriptions, and it is entirely appropriate for a merchant to reject them in this context.
Why? Because from the point of the view of the customer, they are the best fit for that purpose.
From the point of view of a legitimate customer who intends to pay for a service, a prepaid card is a poor fit for an ongoing subscription, as it will stop working unpredictably when its funds are exhausted (causing it to start rejecting all charges).
Optimizing for customers who intend to ditch a service without paying for it is not a goal.
A simple example of one of the services I use, Mailerlite. When the funds are depleted, I receive an email from them they were unable to charge me this month and they downgraded me to their free plan, and they will try again in two days. I then charge my card, they charge me and everything is fine. You don't want people like me - fine, you will have less customers. And I'm a very loyal customer, cases like failed payment happen maybe once 2-3 years.
To extend the plea, if anyone knows how to do this in Canada, I’d love to know. As far as I know the services that exist are USA only.
However, one service that is doing this is Revolut which has a private beta for Canadian users and will provide virtual cards[1,2].
0: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-09/visa-mast...
1: https://www.revolut.com/en-CA
2: https://www.revolut.com/en-CA/legal/premium-fees#card:~:text...
This is definitely a limiter for me when signing up for these free sites: it usually is couched with language along the lines of you don’t want your business to be impacted by us turning off your service, but I am not joining as a business, I am joining as a “I am a developer investigating if this is worth it for my business”
I would prefer plans along the lines of “pay us $10 to activate, if you go over traffic we cut you off but guarantee no other charges, if you leave we refund your $10 no questions asked” or “no charge upfront, if you go over the free tier we charge up to $10 once only and then cut you off”