Hacker News Reader

Comment by JJMcJ | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com