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Comment by iamjbn | Hacker News Reader

Anonymous payment is a good idea. Do you use any other service that supports anonymous payments?

In Germany there is a payment provider (viacash) that allows customers to pay in cash at selected retailers. You get a code, it gets scanned in the supermarket, you pay without any requirement for identification and get a confirmation. Big fan of that, but unfortunately only few websites are using it yet.

How would automatic recurring payments be handled with this?

They aren't. It is meant for prepaid models, which is kind of a feature for me.

Oh OK. Changing model to pay per use is something we thought of but most people told us they would feel anxiety to search and preferred a fixed monthly fee. We are continuing to have an open discussion about this in Discord, our site and here on HN so lets see if we figure it out.

Prepaid doens't have to mean pay-per-use. It can mean I load up 50€ to my account and you debit 10€ per month until the account balance is less than 10€.

posteo.de still has a fixed monthly fee with this model. They just limit the account if the credit is used up.

Ok so a way to top off account with a one time payment may be a good idea.

Some other pay-with-cash methods in other countries are paysafecash (like viacash), paysafecard (only anonymous if you meet strict KYC requirements), some gambling related one (whatever) and cash-by-mail.

Do note that all of them have significant fees and probably not that many users.

Thank you for considering it

agreed. I would start to be paranoid making searches at will if I knew they are paid one by one

Yes, VPN and e-mail.

Mullvad would be one of the prime examples here:

> Which payment methods do you accept?

> We accept cash, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Monero, bank wire, credit card, PayPal, Swish, Giropay, Eps transfer, Bancontact, iDEAL, and Przelewy24. With credit card and PayPal, you have the option to set up a monthly recurring subscription.

> Can I really pay with cash?

> You bet, and please! Stay anonymous all the way. Just put your cash and payment token (randomly generated on our website) in an envelope and send it to us. We accept the following currencies: EUR, USD, GBP, SEK, DKK, NOK, CHF, CAD, AUD, NZD.

https://mullvad.net/en/pricing/

Posteo [1] also allows cash. But I'd say there that makes more sense than with Mullvad, because as a VPN provider they'll very likely know your IP address during operation, while for posteo you could at least access through tor (which doesn't make sense for Mullvad)

[1]: https://posteo.de/en/help/how-do-i-add-credit-to-my-account#...

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