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A virtual card is a disposable card number pointed at one merchant, with a spending limit you set. Privacy.com‘s free plan gives you 12 new ones a month; its paid plans run $5, $10 and $25 a month — $60, $120 and $300 a year. Those figures were read from Privacy’s own pricing page on 3 September 2026.
That’s the whole product, so the useful question is narrow: do you need to pay for them, and what do they actually fix? The claim repeated everywhere — that a virtual card lets you walk away from any subscription — is false, and believing it is how people end up with a delinquent account instead of a cancelled one.
What the options cost
Privacy.com, from privacy.com/pricing, 3 September 2026:
| Plan | Monthly | Annual | New cards per month | What the fee buys |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Personal | $0 | $0 | 12 | Single-use and merchant-locked cards, spend limits, pause and close, 3% foreign transaction fee ($0.50 min) |
| Plus | $5 | $60 | 24 | Category-locked cards, card sharing, card notes, API access |
| Pro | $10 | $120 | 36 | Everywhere Cards (3 open, max), 1% cashback on up to $4,500/mo, no foreign transaction fee |
| Premium | $25 | $300 | 60 | Same features, higher card limit — Privacy labels it “best for small businesses” |
Notice one thing in that table: the annual price is exactly twelve times the monthly price. $5 a month is “$60 billed annually” on Privacy’s own page. No annual discount at all, which makes this one of the rare subscriptions where paying yearly buys nothing but a longer commitment — the opposite of the usual pattern.
Capital One’s Eno virtual card numbers are the other mainstream option. Per Capital One’s page, read 3 September 2026: a browser extension creates a merchant-specific number at checkout, you can lock, unlock or auto-lock any of them, charges appear on your normal statement and earn the same rewards, and it requires an eligible Capital One credit card. The page lists no fee — we say “no separate charge” rather than “free”, because Capital One doesn’t use that word and we won’t put it in their mouth.
Wise issues regenerable digital cards, but ordering the card is a one-time $9 (wise.com/us/card, 3 September 2026) — it’s a currency card first. Two gaps we won’t paper over: Citi’s virtual account number pages both return a “Page Not Found” body, so we can’t confirm that feature still exists, and Revolut’s US pricing page served us a bot check instead of prices.
Calculation 1: count the cards you’d actually create
The free ceiling is 12 new cards a month — 144 a year. Test yourself against it:
Count the distinct new online merchants you handed a card to in the last three months. Divide by three. That’s your monthly card rate.
For almost every household the answer is under three: signups come in bursts — a house move, a January of good intentions — then nothing for months. If your number is under 12, Plus at $60 a year buys card slots you’ll never use.
The limit that matters is new cards created per month, not cards open. A merchant-locked card set up in 2024 keeps paying that merchant forever without touching this month’s allowance, so a household with thirty live subscriptions still only needs new cards when something changes.
Calculation 2: what Pro has to do to earn its $120
Pro costs $120 a year and offers two things you can put a number on. Both break-evens come off Privacy’s pricing page:
- No foreign transaction fee, against 3% on Personal and Plus. $120 ÷ 0.03 = $4,000 a year of foreign-currency transactions before the fee saving covers the subscription.
- 1% cashback on eligible spend up to $4,500 a month. $120 ÷ 0.01 = $12,000 a year routed through Privacy to break even on cashback alone. Everywhere Cards are excluded from earning it.
Put that against a realistic bill. Run $600 a year of subscriptions through Privacy, every one billed in a foreign currency — already unusual — and the 3% fee costs you $18. Pro would cost $102 more than it saves. It’s a plan for real foreign spending, not for managing streaming subscriptions.
What a virtual card genuinely fixes
Three, and they’re worth having:
- A hard ceiling. Set the monthly limit to the exact price, or a $1 total limit on a trial. When the price rises, the charge declines instead of quietly going through — the defence against the pattern in meal-kit intro offers, where the second box costs double the first.
- A merchant lock. A number stolen from one retailer’s database is useless anywhere else.
- Pause one payment line without touching the others. Rotating your real card number breaks every subscription you want to keep, which is why people put it off.
The arithmetic on that last point is the honest case for virtual cards, and it’s strong. Spotify Premium Individual is $12.99 a month — $155.88 a year (spotify.com/us/premium, 3 September 2026, after the current three-months-free intro). One forgotten subscription of that size, stopped by a card you’d closed, covers Privacy Plus for two and a half years. On the free plan it costs nothing at all.
What a virtual card does not fix
Closing a card is not cancelling. The contract survives the payment method. What the merchant sees is a failed payment: it retries, it emails, it suspends access, and an unpaid balance can end up somewhere less pleasant than your inbox. You don’t escape an obligation by making yourself hard to bill — you acquire a delinquent account. The order is always cancel first, then close the card. Our guide to finding and cancelling forgotten subscriptions is the step no card replaces.
A declined renewal looks identical to a mistake. The subscriptions killed by a too-tight limit are usually ones you wanted, and annual renewals bite hardest, because a cap you set at one month’s price will decline a yearly charge roughly ten times the size.
It finds nothing. A virtual card is a control, not a detector — it can only limit merchants you already thought about. If your real problem is not knowing what’s leaving your account, that’s a bank-statement job or a tracker job, and we compared what those cost in Rocket Money vs Bobby. The subscriptions people most often forget are forgotten precisely because nobody looks.
Some merchants may refuse them. We found no documented merchant blocklist on Privacy’s own pages, so treat this as a risk to test with one small charge rather than a confirmed limitation — worth doing before you route a bill you can’t afford to have fail.
One structural difference between the two main routes: Capital One’s numbers sit on top of a real credit card, so rewards and card benefits carry over, per Capital One’s own page. Privacy’s cards are issued by Patriot Bank, N.A. under Mastercard and Visa licences — a separate card, carrying its own protections rather than your credit card’s.
The verdict
Use Privacy’s free Personal plan if you want spending caps and merchant locks on a handful of subscriptions. Twelve new cards a month is more than most households will ever create, and $0 is the right price for a feature your bank arguably should have given you.
Use Capital One’s Eno numbers instead if you already hold an eligible Capital One credit card — no separate charge, rewards keep accruing, no second account to manage.
Pay $60 a year for Plus only if you genuinely create more than 12 new cards a month, or need card sharing across a household. Category locks are a nice-to-have, not $60 of one.
Pay $120 for Pro only if you clear roughly $4,000 a year of foreign transactions or $12,000 of total spend through Privacy. Below those lines the fee exceeds the benefit, on Privacy’s own numbers.
Don’t pay for any of this if your problem is that you don’t know what you’re subscribed to. A virtual card can’t tell you that, and $60 a year for a tool aimed at the wrong problem is one more line on the statement you weren’t reading. Read 90 days of statements first, then decide whether you need cards at all.
And don’t reach for a virtual card as an exit from something you’ve already agreed to. That’s the use case the internet recommends most and the one that can genuinely cost you — cancel properly, then close the card behind you.
Verified 3 September 2026. Every Privacy.com figure — four plan prices, card limits, the 3% foreign fee, the cashback cap, the Everywhere Card limit and the Patriot Bank, N.A. issuer — was read from privacy.com/pricing that day. Capital One’s features, eligibility and rewards treatment come from capitalone.com/digital/tools/eno/virtual-card-numbers/, which states no fee: hence “no separate charge” rather than “free”. Wise’s $9 is from wise.com/us/card; Spotify’s $12.99 from spotify.com/us/premium, used only as an arithmetic example. Three things we could not confirm and therefore don’t assert: a live Citi virtual account number product, Revolut’s US plan prices, and any documented list of merchants that reject virtual cards. This site analyses published pricing and terms; we have not used these products.