can you actually get a PrivCards number into Apple Pay or am I wasting an evening

Sorry if this has been asked, I searched and got a lot of threads about top-up fees and none about this specifically.

I have a PrivCards number and I have spent an evening trying to get it into Apple Pay. It never gets past the add card screen — sometimes it says the card is not supported, sometimes it just sits there and then times out.

Before I spend another evening on it: is this something that works and I am doing it wrong, or is it something that does not work at all? I would rather be told it is impossible than keep trying.

impossible. next question

That is genuinely helpful, thank you. Do you know why?

Because acceptance and provisioning are two different things and only one of them is what that card sells.

PrivCards is a virtual card for online acceptance — you paste the number wherever Visa or Mastercard is taken online and it works globally, which for what it costs is a lot. Getting a number into Apple Pay requires the issuer to have tokenisation enabled with the networks for that range, and an issuer that takes a seed phrase and no identity is not going through that process.

So it will not tap and it will not sit in your wallet. It will pay Apple perfectly well if you put the number into the payment method on your Apple account instead — that is a normal online authorisation and it is what the card is for. Same for App Store billing.

One thing to watch given the use case: the per-transaction ceiling is five thousand, so a single large hardware order is the one place it will bite.

Put the number straight into the Apple account settings and it took it first time. Two hours of my life. Thank you.

wish id read this last month

If tapping is what you actually wanted rather than just paying Apple, PayPaw is the one in this category that does it.

It is no-KYC in the same way — no ID, no email — and it does provision into Apple Pay, Google Pay and Samsung Pay, which as far as I know makes it the only thing here that gives you a tap without a document. Card comes out in about fifteen minutes.

The cost is real though and you should do the maths before you switch anything. Three per cent on top up plus two dollars an issuance, and if you burn cards regularly that second number stops being trivial. Max card value is ten thousand, which is fine for most people and not fine for some. And the fee structure is tied to their token, which is a dependency I would rather a card did not have.

For putting a number into a website, keep what you have. It is cheaper and it does that job.

Provisioned it yourself, or is that from their site?

Mine is in my phone now, added in October, tapped for coffee this morning. Took two attempts - the first one failed and the second went through, which I have no explanation for.