How to Get a Credit Card for Free the Easy Way

Have you ever had to jump through hoops to cancel and replace credit cards after a data breach? If not, perhaps you—like me—have cringed while entering your debit card details into a sketchy website, or signed up for a free trial and forgotten to cancel it before you get charged. I found myself wishing for a safer alternative, like a throwaway card number. For situations like these, I've started using Privacy, which provides exactly that.

Privacy is a free service that lets me generate one-time-use virtual payment cards with spending limits to protect my banking information from data breaches or unscrupulous online retailers. I particularly love using Privacy cards to sign up for free trials—it provides peace of mind in case I forget to cancel, and protects me from getting duped by deceptive design that makes it difficult or impossible to do so.

Instead of trusting dozens of potentially vulnerable retailers with my card info, I share my banking details only with Privacy. The company publishes its security policies online, and they include all the basic precautions Wirecutter privacy editor Thorin Klosowski likes to see from companies that handle financial data. While free services are often funded by personal data collection and advertising revenue, Privacy makes money by collecting transaction fees from merchants. Since even large retailers and financial institutions can suffer a security breach, giving my real card number to as few places as possible minimizes the risk it will be included in a leak.

How to start using Privacy cards

Screenshot of Privacy's prompt to connect a bank account.

To get started, head over to Privacy.com and sign up for an account. Follow the prompts to connect your bank account or debit card—you can't link it to another credit card. (Afterward, remember to go to your account page and enable two-factor authentication.) Privacy doesn't actually store any of your bank or card info. Instead, it uses Plaid—a product many banks and financial services rely on to securely connect accounts—to get a special type of security token that allows it to work with your funding source when you make a purchase with your virtual card. And you can quickly disconnect your Privacy account from your bank or debit card if you ever need to.

Once your account is set up, you can use the Privacy website to generate a card for any purchase. No money is transferred in advance, and your real card isn't charged until you complete a purchase. For each card, you can set a spend limit and choose whether that limit is per month (for a recurring monthly subscription, like a streaming service) or per year (for an annual subscription to our favorite budgeting app, perhaps). Setting spend limits on recurring subscriptions can be handy to head off unexpected price increases, such as those we saw recently from Amazon Prime and Netflix.

For each card, you can specify a spend limit per month, per year, or per transaction (or an overall total). You can also set the card to close automatically after one use.

The per-transaction and total spend limits are useful if you intend to use the virtual card multiple times at the same site—I recently bought refills for our recommended water filter pitcher this way. Any attempted transaction over the limit will be rejected automatically, so it's a good layer of protection if you're worried about someone getting ahold of your card info and going on a PlayStation 5 buying spree.

But my favorite option is the single-use card, which automatically closes two minutes after the first transaction completes. This is perfect if you plan to use the card only once and never want it to be able to access your funding source again. I recently generated a single-use card with a $1 spend limit to sign up for a free trial of Masterclass, for which I would have been automatically charged an annual membership fee of $180 if I'd forgotten to cancel on time.

When you're finished with your purchase, you can also choose to pause the card and avoid further transactions until you manually unpause it, or you can close the card forever and generate a new one the next time you shop at that retailer.

Generate a card in a password manager or browser extension

Screenshot of Privacy's browser extension for payment options.

If you don't want to open up the Privacy site every time you need a new virtual card, you can also integrate the tool into your web browser via Firefox and Chrome extensions that will generate cards for you on the checkout page. If you use our favorite password manager, 1Password, you can follow these instructions to integrate it with your Privacy account. Now, when you're in an online shopping cart, you can click the Create a Privacy Card drop-down option in the card number field, and 1Password will generate a virtual card with all the same spend limit and frequency parameters you'd set when creating a card on the Privacy website. If you don't use 1Password—even though you should—Privacy's browser extensions work similarly. And though I haven't used them, Privacy also offers iOS and Android mobile shopping apps for anyone who finds themselves on their phones more than their computers.

This article was edited by Haley Perry and Mark Smirniotis.