What also kind of gets my goat is that Privacy has rules in their terms permitting a 3% surcharge for virtual cards backed by a credit card. They just don't have that capability in real life.

I messaged them back when they first opened to complain about the username and password requirement and the response was basically "fraud prevention but we're going to require it for you to use our service."

I do use Privacy's service but point it at a "play" bank account that I keep relatively little money in at a different institution than my regular account.

Early Final adopter here. I liked the product but wasn't able to differentiate between Final and other VCCs.

Bank of America and Citibank offer virtual credit card creation which is very close to what Final does. Their UI is very clunky but does the trick without worrying about the liability part.

I was using Bank of America's ShopSafe system a decade ago. Remember all those "Get a free Xbox for completing these 12 free trial offers" scams?

Well, it turned out that some of them weren't necessarily scams, and there were whole forums dedicated to actually completing the offers, keeping proper documentation and claiming the prizes.

Most of the free trial offers validated your credit card for the initial free month, and then made it incredibly difficult to cancel the service. So I'd just sign up with a ShopSafe number that was valid for 1 month with a $1 limit.

Typically, instead of actually shipping you the Xbox or whatever the prize was, if you completed the offer they'd just send you a check. The year after I got out of college when I had plenty of free time, I managed to get about $1,200 thanks to those offers and ShopSafe.

It's not a feature I'd use enough to have it dictate my overall credit card choice, but I'd love it if more issuers added to their products.

Ahhh the good old days. I'd have spreadsheets of when to cancel trial offers. Probably earned about $20-30k in electronics and cash overall during Freshman year in college.

Me and my roommates did this as well. We did it so much that one of my roommates actually got a legally threatening letter from on of the companies behind most of them (Trilegent I think it was) telling him to stop because he was abusing the system. Which was funny because they were so scammy to begin with.

Yikes. The worst I got was being sent to collections for a teeth whitening product that was designed to bill regardless of trial cancellation. I learned a ton about negotiating with customer service departments during this time too.

I use both of the BofA and Citi virtual credit card services, as I used to do a lot of QA testing on payments processing systems. They both seem to be using the same backend service.

I even made a crappy WinForm app that would generate a ton of credit card numbers at once: https://github.com/ch4/ss_gen

I kept wanting to make something like this but I’ve always been too lazy. Thank you! Does it still work? I haven’t used shopsafe in years but I remember it being a pretty crappy interface

That's good to know. I've been eyeing the Citi Doublecash for the longest time, but being rather new to the US, I haven't built up a long enough credit history for them to accept my application (I was rejected the last time I applied).

Hopefully the service will still be there when I finally get my hands on that card.

Get a secured card and you'll be eligible for a Double Cash in no time. A secured card is for people with little to no history, its a credit card where you have to put up some collateral, a deposit account usually equal to the credit limit. Many cards just automatically convert to non-secured card after a while of good account history.

I've heard good things about Discover IT Secured https://www.discover.com/credit-cards/secured/ no fees, has rewards, and it automatically converts to a non secured version quickly.

Oh yeah, Citibank's website absolutely sucks. Very buggy.

You could also look at Abine's Blur. It avoids the liability problem. But is more expensive, in general.

My understanding is that Regulation E sharply limits your liability, even if you have shared your username and password: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-column-weston-banks/why-b...

Thank you for that read. I guess I may have fallen for the banks' FUD.

Maybe I will consider trying out Privacy after all? Probably with a secondary account at first.

I really liked the concept of Final and I used mine for all one-off purchases from random merchants online. The app made it very easy to generate a card on the fly, the UI was nice, and support was nice and helpful the couple times I reached out.

I found, probably like a lot of others, I just didn’t put much volume through it. The rewards were just too weak compared to any of my other cards to justify using it as a primary card.

The rewards (1% cash back) would never pay for the (initial) yearly cost. When I called to cancel my card citing the yearly fee they waived it- and two weeks later announced they were killing the yearly fee.

In the two-ish years I had the card I put roughly $1,500 through. Comparatively, I have averaged over $9K/mo through my AmEx Platinum in the last two years.

Yeah, the lacklustre rewards is definitely one of my pet peeves with it too. That and the foreign transaction fee, which killed the prospect of using it for shady foreign websites.

Also, one thing that Privacy gets right that Final didn't was the UX around virtual card generation. Privacy had browser extensions that let you generate new cards and autofill them on just about any website. Final never did, and that made making online purchases with a one-time Final virtual card a huge chore (though still less so than using a regular physical credit card).

If someone makes a Final clone that has 2% flat cashback, no foreign transaction fees, and a browser extension, I could totally see myself putting all of my purchases on it by default without a second thought.

Hi - I'm Yana, Co-founder of Token. You can download the app via www.jointoken.com/app.

The reason you were asked for the phone number is to make your life easier and to text you the link :) Enjoy token and let me know how it works for you. Stay safe.

I used the link you posed to find your app in Google Play. Like the others who left reviews in Google Play, I don't want this tied to either LinkedIn or Facebook. Since you collect phone number, why not use Cognito to verify users?

Yeah this is a deal breaker for me too. Phone number is also no good. If you want to target people who value privacy, offering email and password signup is really a bare minimum.

Also, I do online shopping on my desktop browser much more often than I do on my phone, so the lack of a web app and web extension makes the app much less usable for me.

It doesn't make life any easier on Android, because you can install apps remotely through the Play Store.

All it does is drive away privacy conscious users who generally aren't willing to hand out phone numbers to random websites.