This Clever New Service Autocancels Your Free Trials

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.

- Emily Dreyfuss

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.