This app lets you sign up for free trials without sharing your card details – and cancels them for you automatically

 DoNotPay, the app that fights parking tickets on your behalf, has added a new feature designed to help you take full advantage of free trials on sites like Netflix, Spotify, Amazon Prime and more. 

The feature, called Free Trial Surfing, provides you with a virtual card and fake email address. When asked to enter your card details to activate a free trial on a variety of sites and services, you can use this virtual card number, expiry date, CVV code and postcode without having to share your personal details. You can also choose to enter a fake email address. 

This fake address will forward all emails from the service provider, including any verification emails needed to set up the account, to your personal email address, but the original site will not know what this private address is. DoNotPay will also remove any location or read-receipt tracking reaching your personal email inbox. 

READ NEXT: What do you get with an Amazon Prime subscription?

At the end of each free trial, DoNotPay will automatically cancel the subscription on your behalf. If, for any reason, the trial isn’t cancelled in time or you are charged for a subscription on your DoNotPay card, the app will cover these costs. You can’t use the card to pay for items, or for any other purpose than for free trials. 

This could prove particularly useful ahead of Amazon’s Black Friday 2019 sales. 

“The idea for this product came when I realised I was being charged for a $21.99 (£18) gym membership from over a year ago that I was never using,” Browder told the BBC. “In fact, I had completely forgotten that I had signed up for a free trial in the first place. Constantly trying to keep track of when a ‘free trial’ period ends is annoying and time-consuming.”

DoNotPay calls itself the world’s first robot lawyer and was launched in 2015 by the then-teenage self-taught coder Joshua Browder. Browder built the chatbot in his bedroom and designed it to automatically appeal parking tickets on behalf of users. Figures suggest he has saved UK and US drivers around £2 million in fines. 

It has since launched features that help you fill in and file government paperwork, get money from creditors and solve customer service problems. The app is free to download but once you have successfully used one of the services, you will be asked to “tip” an amount of money, which defaults at £3. This goes towards funding the app and its services to help other people. 

READ NEXT: When is Black Friday 2019?

DoNotPay says it does not store any personal transactions and has no access to your account details. Its systems use 256-bit SSL encryption and the connection is handled via Stripe. The Free Trial Surfing feature card is powered by an unnamed high street bank. This guarantees it is accepted by the sites you’re signing up to. 

The new feature is legal but sites are likely to object to its use. This is why Browder is not revealing which high street bank is powering the service to avoid the sites from clamping down or banning users from using the DoNotPay card. It’s available online and the Apple App Store.