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Comment by josephcsible | Hacker News Reader

> Anyway a "free" trial that asks for your cc number is obviously not free.

There is a legitimate reason to do that: to keep people from making a bunch of accounts and getting free trials with them forever.

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Couldn’t you make the free trial useful enough to show off the product, yet _incomplete_ in such a way that continually making new accounts is not viable?

An example.. a marketing mail app where the trial only allows you to mail 1 or 2 campaigns with a max of 5 email addresses (recipients) for each. In that scenario you’d see the full capability of the product but couldn’t use it for a full email campaign. Creating more accounts wouldn’t help you game the trial.

I think not taking people’s CC is important.

But you'd want to test that the mail campaign manager handles large campaigns efficiently, etc.. I guess there's a suggestion here that two trial options should be available a "trial with CC" where you get access to the whole product and a "trial without CC" where you get access to a simulcrum of the product, like you can use Netflix but it only shows the first 5 minutes of all shows or something.

I'm moving web/email hosting providers at the moment and the range of trials available is interesting. Two examples to highlight the range: Linode offers a $100 USD value to use in a time-limited trial (one month IIRC); OVH wouldn't even give me a trial on request and have a minimum 12 month upfront charge (I can't believe they're serious, every provider has given a free trial in the past even if only for a week or two [which is not long enough for me to get a proper view of someone's service]).

sounds like a lot of dev work for little to no value..

I always just create a virtual number through my CC, set the maximum to $1, and have it expire within a couple months. Works like a charm.

If you don't have a card that allows that, you can also buy a prepaid card, though I believe such cards may have distinctive numbers and it's possible a vendor may disallow.

I use https://privacy.com/ for this.

One of the best discoveries I found on hn a few years ago

Thank you. Never knew about this service, was looking, obviously not hard enough, for exactly this. But really do think they should advertise better. This would help with managing expenses too.

I had to sit on a waiting list for a few weeks to get invited to it about 1 year ago. I don’t know what that was all about but it seems they aren’t in a rush for more users.

Btw their numbers don’t work with Adobe, but I used Privacy for a Microsoft Office trial about 6 months ago and I got an email every time Microsoft attempted to charge me, which was approximately once/week before I just deleted that card.

Thanks for the pointer!

Looks like it’s US-only.

I haven’t been able to find a service like this that supports Australian users, so looking for suggestions!

I'm in NZ, but I can use https://statescard.com/ and they seem to be pretty good.

I use this for signing up to watch HBO Max and some other subscriptions. It's pretty handy.

wise also offer virtual cards, which works in NZ, possibly in Aussie too? https://wise.com/nz/virtual-card/

They are the best. They're big issue used to be that they gave out _debit_ numbers, which a lot of things would not accept. But, this year they transitioned to credit, so even that problem has gone away.

The “personal” plan is free. I’m always cautious with free things that use my personal data - if you're not paying for the product, you are the product.

How are they able to keep this free?

Like any credit card company, they charge fees to the vendor. Something like 1.5%+$0.30 of every transaction. It even says on their website,

> we make money from the interchange paid by merchants

I don’t use it for everything. Only things I want to place a limit on. The data can’t be worth very much.

Sadly it is only available to US residents :(

Yeah, I wanted to sign up for Oracle's free cloud, I tried a pre-paid credit card and it was disallowed.

Patreon, for example, will not accept a pre-paid card.

I use Privacy with Patreon. It works great.

How do you do that?

Not sure about the US but in Europe there is Revolut that allows you to create virtual credit card numbers tied to your main account. They can be deleted/disposed of at any time in the app.

About 6-8 years ago, all major credit card companies in US has the virtual CC service: BoA, Citi, Chase, you name it. Passing one period, they all started to shut down the service, saving Citi.

I don't know why Citi still has this service, and seems to keep developing it (it used to be a Flash page, and since Flash is out commissioned, they rewrote the whole service into HTML).

So if you are in US, get a Citi CC or something like privacy.com.

Does citi let you create any no. of virtual numbers and can you set limits for them ? I sorely miss the BoA flash feature and haven't found a replacement. I would sign for citi if it's the same.

I just tried generating 5 numbers without problem. It seems you can generate as many as you want.

You can set expiration time and daily spending limit for the numbers. Also optionally assign a name for each number.

Note that I have two Citi CC but only one card has this service. So some card may not. The one available to me is the double cash card.

Anyone with a legitimate use isn’t going to create large numbers of emails just to do this. It’s a complete waste of time for any professional.

You don't need to create a bunch of emails, just unique enough addresses. I've got a catch-all on my domain, that's unlimited address. Gmail will let you alias with anything using +, and ignores periods last I checked.

Bots are an annoying adversary to have, I'll tell you that much. If there is any way to make money out of it - including those you couldn't have imagined - someone on the internet is going to figure it out and it will be worth their while

My engineering manager at my old job made double my salary and yet bragged about how every month he was on a new Netflix and Amazon Prime 30 day trial.

Part of the problem it could be argued is the CC card here - you want my CC number? Fine. I should have to initiate the transaction, hit "Go", not the other way around.

I can block charges, but this would be a more valid reason if it really were just about limiting "freebies".

Actually for this reason I prefer to use a small account with limited liability e.g. Paypal or a low limit CC, precisely because there's less risk for me. Why should company XYZ have unlimited power to randomly charge me tens of thousands of dollars? They shouldnt.

It also means you’re more serious about paying for the service

Virtual credit card numbers where you can set a low limit + early expiration date can be useful for avoiding the dark pattern of "free" trials that you can't cancel.

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