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Comment by InvaderFizz | Hacker News Reader

They will reject any temporary card number for sure, I believe they also reject all prepaid cards and debit-as-credit based on others experiences.

On the bright side, even with a normal credit card, your account is never billable unless you take the affirmative step to convert from Free Tier.

The free tier is very generous and what I use for personal projects and hosting.

- 2x AMD VMs each with 1GB RAM

- 4 ARM64 Cores and 24GB of RAM to divide up(or not) however you want.

- 200GB of Block Storage

- public IPv4 (and now IPv6) addresses for each VM.

- 10 TB/month egress.

Your upper limit is 4 VMs total because the minimum boot volume is 47GB, so that's the max you can subdivide the storage.

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All cloud providers I've tested will reject proxy cards, which are assigned from prepaid card pools. More businesses seem to be doing this as of late. It's rather unfortunate, since proxy cards are a fantastic fraud prevention device.

For what it's worth, I've been able to use a prepaid card with <WELL-KNOWN LARGE CLOUD PROVIDER> for a while now without any problems. Maybe they're not all created equal.

I second and confirm this. It is true, but my <CLOUD PROVIDER> has been cracking down on it more more recently.

Just curious: why are you and GP unwilling to mention the providers' names?

Sounds more mysterious, gets people going.

I figured it might be a little imprudent to explicitly mention what I'm getting away with, and with whom. Especially in a public forum where many of this company's employees may very well see it. I'd be shocked if they took action, admittedly. Still, I feel like it's good policy never to explicitly invite misfortune upon yourself.

I've not had a problem with this with <LEGACY DEDICATED SERVER PROVIDER>.

I’m willing to bet it’s AWS with 90% certainty - they seem to have very lenient card policies compared to other cloud platforms I’ve worked with. (GCP, on the other hand, won’t even accept debit card - only credit)

> GCP, on the other hand, won’t even accept debit card - only credit

That's not true in my experience: I've been paying my GCP bill with debit cards from three different banks for years. (They were branded as VISA or Mastercard, mind you, but still debit cards.)

GCP in the EU accept debit cards, same as AWS, Azure, Oracle, Scaleway, OVH. They'd be crazy not to ( credit cards are rare here), but still.

I had one that worked a couple years ago but it expired. I couldn't add a new one.

Considering how many people on the internet talk about using these cards for evading contractual obligations (e.g. cancelling the card instead of going through the contract cancellation process and paying the termination fee, if any), it's surprising their acceptance has lasted as long as it has.

Cancellation fees are ridiculous nonsense in 99% of cases anyway. I have no sympathy.

They are ridiculous. Nonetheless, they are legal obligations.

I would be with you if so many corporations didn't already exploit customers with the whole "yeah, tough luck, whatcha gonna do about it? have fun suing us" attitude. You can't blame customers for taking the same approach when that's already corporate America's MO.

And don't forget that on top of exploitative practices, corporations frequently game the legal process too... like forcing customers to sign away their rights to sue in court, and all that.

They are usually not, illegal clauses are still illegal even if you clicked an "accept" button.

Edit: one of many examples https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/06/02/automatic...

Nonetheless, a prepaid card is legal tender.

Are you just saying that randomly or do you have any good reason to think it's true? :)

> Nonetheless, a prepaid card is legal tender.

No, it's not, an even if it was, that would create no obligation of a vendor to let you use it to establish an account. The effect of legal tender comes when making an attempt to pay an existing debt, not when trying to establish a relationship in which charges might be incurred in the future.

It's almost tragic that how many times things that are "legal", are neither right nor good. In ideal world, atleast, those qualities should have been mandated to make something a law.

Either laws are way too old for the current times or were made worse by lobbying groups in favour those with might.

Things don't seem to be getting better (cookie annoyance being one example) unfortunately.

Immoral obligations aren't obligations.

> evading contractual obligations

If by contractual obligations you mean "clauses that are most probably illegal but the average person will usually just shut up and pay rather that lawyer-up against a multibillion corporation", then yes I can see how many, me included, just opt for one of those cards whenever possible.

It goes both ways. Im sure there are scummy customers out there using it as a tool to not pay businesses money that is legitimately owed.

Cancelling is oftentimes borderline impossible. Especially for people who can’t spend all day on a phone getting shifted around countless times or waiting forever for online support to respond (and sometimes never follow up).

Maybe if companies didn’t make cancellation processes so actively hostile to users or throw in mysterious charges that continue accruing for all eternity, people wouldn’t be so uncomfortable using their normal card?

I use them all the time to ensure I don't get auto enrolled for garbage services. Like when you buy something from Nordic track and there's no way to opt out of auto enrolling for iFit. It's predatory and feel no shame in my tactics. I've also caught a number of breeches and just plain old scummy businesses (three times I got pings on one time use Amazon cards).

You can use proxy cards in your day to day life.

If you hand your classic card details to a company like Oracle or AWS, your card isn't exposed to the same threats as when you use it to buy something at the gas station.

AWS overcharging my card due to their unclear pricing structure seems like a much more realistic & costly threat than someone putting a skimmer in a gas station

Especially as one is a 'once off' use, the other is billing on demand.

That's a great world to live in but it's not true. I have caught three fraud attempts from cards only used on Amazon.

> All cloud providers I've tested will reject proxy cards, which are assigned from prepaid card pools. More businesses seem to be doing this as of late. It's rather unfortunate, since proxy cards are a fantastic fraud prevention device.

You do realize that letting people anonymously host whatever they want from reputable ASNs is a bad thing, right?

I would say that the invention of the concept of "reputable ASNs" is the root cause.

How dare you to send me a mail from an IP range which was used for port scanning three years ago?

I have also really enjoyed Oracle Free Tier services. Across all the cloud providers I consider them the absolute best. I have not paid Oracle one single dime in over two years and have done things I’d have been happy to pay for.

The value to being able to have a public reverse SSH proxy to a home network system is great!

While it has none of the nice UX my opinion is that Oracle Cloud Free Tier is the spiritual replacement for the old Cloud9 IDE which Amazon bought and then destroyed. Again, not as nice, but for me I can get the equivalent compute resource that Cloud9 would have provided and just use emacs entirely for free. No need to play stupid games with AWS credits or whatever.

The ARM64 VMs are unbelievable. I'm running all my personal stuff on one instance with 4 cores, 24GB RAM and 200BG disk space for free. Before I payed Digital Ocean 5$ a month for one Intel core with 1GB RAM and 20GB disk space.

> The free tier is very generous and what I use for personal projects and hosting.

Do you have all your personal projects and hosting in a single account?

I’m familiar with the AWS best practice of creating one account per service-region. But that doesn’t seem compatible with free tiers.

The Oracle FAQ [1] says anyone who has not previously signed up for free tier is eligible. I think that means an individual, but it could be interpreted as a service or project.

According to AWS one account per organization is eligible for free tier [2]. That implies to me I could have one organization [3] per project.

[1]: https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/faq/

[2]: https://aws.amazon.com/free/free-tier-faqs/

[3]: https://aws.amazon.com/organizations/faqs/

Didn't work for me on Azure either. They all also want a working phone #. I hope burners will always be cash purchasable.

Saw this post of yours and got excited. However they won't accept my debit card or credit cards (both of which are used online for other services) and the sign in form craps out in various ways. The email confirmation process is very slow and is taking 10+ minutes to email me.

It's a terrible sign up process - ironic given the thread this has appeared in, but I cant read the article as it's been hugged to death.

That's interesting. I wonder how they can tell it is a temporary number. That defeats a major benefit of a temporary card.

Banks and their number sequences are easy to keep track of. The sum of trusted banks is a finite list which anyone could compile.

If you are in Germany, they do accept the prepaid VIMpay, which basically is just an app for your phone.

I used Zen virtual credit card with no issues with Oracle Cloud. Card was created 15 minutes before using with Oracle.

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