I learned this hack about a decade ago when a friend of mine told me he’s been doing this for years. You know when you’ve got one of those Visa gift cards that seems worthless because it’s only got like $1.50 left on it? If you put those in as your credit card information during any service that offers a free trial but asks for your credit card info, you can safely not have to worry about canceling the service before it charges you for it after the free trial. It will attempt to charge the gift card, get declined, and cancel the service for you.
I normally just cancel immediately. Almost all services let you continue until the trial period ends anyway, hoping you’ll change your mind
Ive gotten them rejected and they ask for real cc before
Bank auditor here - this hardly works anymore. You cannot set up recurring charges on a closed-loop card. If it does work it’s actually due to the fact the system was set up wrong or has a glitch.
Even easier — use www.privacy.com to generate single use or recurring cards linked to your bank. You can lock or close the cards at any time and also specify how much to spend before declining charges.
I’m willing to pay 50 cents on the dollar for all those useless gift cards you have laying around
Or use the app Revolut. They allow card verification and then the actual charge, which is where most companies catch onto single use cards. Revolut then doesn’t allow the card to be charged again, but you may still receive refunds if needed. It’s great man. I use it for all online shopping.
I just set an event reminder in my calendar for a couple of days before the trial ends. Not sure why everyone is complicating something so simple.
I just don’t bother with free trials. There is nothing I need in a free trial to make it worth the while.
This is a useful hack! Worth it for me to go out and buy a $5 gift card for myself. I haven’t been gifted a one in a while.
Better advice: Use a service that lets you create cancellable virtual cards. You don’t need to go out and buy Visa cards. You can use a service like privacydotcom to create virtual cards that you can cancel or that expire after a single transaction. Credit cards like X1 also allow you to do this. Revolut is a debit card that lets you do this as well. Whole process takes less than 10 seconds.
I mean, you can just set a calendar reminder? Then use that $1.50 balance towards a purchase of something.
It depends on what youre trying to get a free trial to. Youtube, Hulu, Netflix, etc used to accept prepaid gift cards but dont anymore.
I think the only ones that do would be amazon and other shopping websites but not 100% sure. Gift cards for free trials will probably end up banned everywhere.
I’ve done this for years and it has always worked.
sadly those cards are not really common in germany
Paypal is another option which more and more subscriptions support. I now have all my subscriptions going through Paypal, and so can manage them all from one central page, even cutting them off if need be with the press of a button.
Depending on the terms and conditions of the trial offer, you may accumulate recurring debt until you follow the cancellation process, and then get sent to collections. Gyms are a famous example of this
Wait until you find out about virtual credit cards
Just use privacy.com app, create a new virtual credit card, set that card to only work with one service, and set a price limit as well. When you sign up for a new service like a vpn or a trial usage of something, create a new virtual credit card and set the spending limit to the trial amount.
oh damn, op is a genius and their friend