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.
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.