Free trial hack

The Donotpay app’s latest feature gives you a crafty digital credit card number you can use to sign up for free trials around the web and never get charged

Every time you sign up for a free trial of any kind, you’re forced to take stock of your outlook on life.

Realists accept that they’ll eventually wind up paying for this thing that is currently free. Pessimists understand this too, but are prematurely embittered even as they plug in their credit card numbers. Optimists assure themselves that they’ll keep track of when the trial ends and they’ll cancel before they are ever charged, if it turns out they don’t want to continue. Oh, the naivete. It’s not until these sunny, positive thinkers are digging through their transaction history in their banking app months later that they see it: $89 (R1 355) a year for a mobile VPN membership? What on earth? And then they remember: It was April, Game of Thrones was finally returning for the last season, and so they signed up for a free trial of a mobile VPN to try to stream it on their phone. Only, it didn’t work because they had terrible Wi-fi signal service, and they fell asleep whimpering in their hotel bed, watching as the spinning loading wheel of death never advanced and they forgot all about the free trial they’d signed up for.

OK, maybe I’m actually talking about me here. But if you’re anything like me, you can relate. Now, there is a more convenient way for you to cancel before ever being charged: a service called Free Trial Card. It’s available now through the app Donotpay, created by 23-year-old coder and entrepreneur Joshua Browder.

The Free Trial Card is a virtual credit card you

can use to sign up for free trials of any service anonymously, instead of using your real credit card. When the free trial period ends, the card automatically declines to be charged, thus ending your free trial. You don’t have to remember to cancel anything. If you want, the app will also send an actual legal notice of cancellation to the service. The Donotpay app will send you an email when you sign up for a service and another when your trial ends – a way of nudging you with the reminder that if you want to convert your trial into a paid subscription, you’ll need to update your payment info and hand over your actual credit card number.

“The idea for this product came when I realised I was being charged for a $21.99 (R335) gym membership from over a year ago that I was never using,” says Browder. As he sees it, companies that require you to put in a credit card in order to sign up for a free trial are engaging in deceptive practices. They’re counting on you to forget that you signed up in the hopes that you’ll continue to pay whether you use their service or not. This, Browder argues, it fundamentally against the principle of “opt-in” services.

But since most free trials don’t work that way, Browder and his 10-person team at Donotpay “found a way to trick the websites,” as he put it, into beginning the free trial without consumers having to put in any of their personal information, financial or otherwise.

You can use Donotpay’s Free Trial Card under any name, with any email and any address. When I generated my bogus credentials using the app, it also gave me a fake email: brownwarthogmilk966@privacy.donotpay.com. Donotpay allows you to use this email to sign up for services, and forwards any emails you get from the service to your real email, after removing location and read-receipt tracking. That requires that you give Donotpay your info though; to get that pseudonymous email address, I first had to give Donotpay my real email address.

money for Nothing

Using the fake email address and the name Brown Warthog, I signed up for Spotify. It worked like a charm. The postal code on the card the app generated for me corresponded to a town in Oregon, or so I learned after Googling.

And the name did not have to match the email address. I verified that when I used the card to reactivate Linkedin Premium from my actual real account, which I had half expected not to work, since the email address was so clearly false. But it did work. And the reason it worked is that Browder’s team is the entity doing the approving. When I clicked Purchase after putting in my false credentials, the request did not go to a bank. It went to Donotpay. When Donotpay’s system got that ping, an algorithm the team spent six months building looked at the code request to see if the purchase was for a free trial. Determining that it was, the system approved my transaction. You can’t use this card to make real purchases.

And yet it’s a real card. A Visa card, no less, backed by a network of community banks, which have a relationship with Browder’s company. The bank network has given Donotpay a business credit card, and allows the company to use it to “act as an agent paying for consumers.” But by now you’ve noticed I haven’t named the bank network. That’s because Browder refuses to name it. “They might shut us down if we mention their name,” he says. Why? Well, for one, the people running the bank network don’t know their service is being used to generate virtual credit cards for the Free Trial Cards service. “Our agreement is to act as an agent for consumers on various payments. And so they do not know specifically about the free trial,” says Browder.

None of this sounds exactly on the up and up to financial experts I spoke to, though they don’t think it’s illegal. When told I didn’t know who the issuing bank was for these cards because Browder would not say, Sarah Grotta, director of the Debit Card and Alternative Products Advisory team at the payments analysis group Mercator, said this: “No, no, no, no, we gotta be open about that. That can’t be a secret.”

Financially, Donotpay’s liability is probably nil, since if everything works right all these transactions involve zero dollars. But if the banks bristle at being used this way, it could present problems. He’s not worried about the Donotpay app itself, which is doing well. Earlier this month it closed a new $4.6 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz. It’s also working with a local San Francisco law firm to make sure all its offerings are legally compliant and robust, and

browder says that it’s the free trial comapnies that are being deceptive, not Donotpay

has plans to become a subscription-based app that offers all its legal and convenience services for a monthly cost of around $3 (R46). Browder is hopeful Free Trial Card will be a part of that. The system seems to work for consumers. And Donotpay has a good track record with its other services, and boasts good basic privacy policies. It has stopgaps in place in case bad actors try to weaponise the Free Trial Card and sign up for a ton of free trials and resell them for profit. But banks, Visa, and the companies offering the free trials may not be so happy.

Browder’s position is that it’s the free trial companies who are being deceptive, not Donotpay. Grotta points out that Mastercard announced earlier this year that it would require companies offering free trials for certain physical products to reach out to customers at the end of the trial period to get their explicit permission to begin charging them, so maybe a trick like this won’t be necessary for long.

That sounds nice, Browder says. But until all free trials change their ways and stop asking people to opt out, he thinks consumers should have a way to make them truly opt-in. Even if that means gaming the system a bit.

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