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Comment by AdamJacobMuller | Hacker News Reader

Seems like they are changing bank partners and will use cards that code as "charge card" instead of "prepaid card" which is great (some places block "prepaid" cards) but they are forcing this change on everyone (as much as I could see) and doing it with only 30 days of notice, which is much less great.

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Always bugged me when I tried to use a Privacy card on Digital Ocean

I don't blame them, though. DO is a "bill-after" company, so if you racked up server time, they're out that money if you attached a pre-paid card with $0 on it.

We use DO as our provider, and we offer trials in our product offering, so if they attach a prepaid card to _our_ service (which people do, all the time), we're out that money, but it's $5 for us, so we eat it.

The thing is that every card has a limit, both regular debit and credit. You can easily have a bank account with no more than a couple dollars in it and DO would accept that just fine.

If you haven't preauthorized, you aren't guaranteed payment. That's why these services also have usage limits, of course--AWS doesn't want me to rack up a million dollar bill without seeing a past payment history that would indicate I can actually afford that.

> DO is a "bill-after" company, so if you racked up server time, they're out that money if you attached a pre-paid card with $0 on it.

Then if they don't want that, don't be bill-after or companies like Privacy will just engineer around that prepaid card limitation.

Everyone is a bill-after company, though. If it was pre-pay, you'd buy $200 of computing time, convert that into 8 cents of today's hot shitcoin, and then initiate a chargeback to get your $200 back. They could make you wait 60 days or whatever, but that's an unpleasant customer experience, so they don't.

With physical goods, there is always the possibility that the merchant could compel you to return the physical good, but with cloud computing, that's nearly impossible.

Weird, I must have added my Privacy card to DO before they made a backend payment processing change. Been using it since July 2016, with a new card in August 2020.

I thought DO had an option to prepay via Paypal.

Yes which means you prefund your expenses. If you provide a prepaid card as a funding source it is likely to not have funds when they attempt to debit you for services already rendered. I'm sure they'd be fine with you prepaying on a prepaid card.

If you're trying to use something like Privacy.com, it's probably because you don't want to have your details shared with others. Using PayPal is not going to to that.

They do

It looks like they have added a manual payment option, though certainly not preferred, so that they can technically comply with some definition of charge card perhaps?

https://support.privacy.com/hc/en-us/articles/4414521565719-...

For reference:

> On December 31, 2021, we will close all Visa Privacy Cards that have not been updated. In order to continue using Privacy.com without interruption, we need you to complete a few simple steps. Visit our FAQs to learn more.

Via the popup transition tool when logging in.

Sad they couldn't keep existing cards open till they expire, but just recently their card expiration dates jumped to lasting till 2027 so I see why.

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