Free trials that reject prepaid BINs — is anything still getting through?

Sorry if this belongs in newbie corner, mods please move it if so.

Background so the question makes sense. I'm testing a lot of tools at the moment - scrapers, a couple of AI things, two schedulers - and almost all of them do the fourteen day trial where they want a card up front and charge you nothing. That's the whole point for me, I want to try six things and keep one. I'm not trying to abuse anyone, I genuinely cannot afford to pay for six tools while I work out which one I need.

The problem is the signup step. About half of them take the card fine. The other half come back with something like "prepaid and virtual cards are not accepted" before it even attempts a charge, so it's not a funds thing, they're checking the BIN and rejecting it on sight.

I've tried three different cards and got the same wall on the same sites, which makes me think it's the category and not the card. But I don't actually know that.

So my question - is there anything in this space whose BIN doesn't come back as prepaid? Or is this just how it is now and I should stop looking?

it's how it is now. the BIN says prepaid because the card is prepaid. there's no clever card that lies about it

Which tools? Some let you skip the card if you go annual.

Six trials. One of them is the one you need. Guess which.

Your reasoning is right - it's the category, not the card - but the conclusion isn't quite. Not every card in this space issues on a prepaid BIN range.

The self-custodial ones tend to sit on debit BINs because the underlying product is a spend account rather than a stored-value card. Bitget Wallet Card and MetaMask Card both fall into that group. Trial pages that filter on prepaid ranges generally let those through in my experience.

The catch, and it's the one that will matter to you: both of them want at least light KYC at signup. Not a passport and a selfie, but an identity step, and if the reason you're here is that you don't want to give anyone anything, that's the trade.

The other thing worth knowing is that a trial gate rejecting your BIN and a trial gate rejecting a $0 authorisation are two different failures that look identical in the browser. Worth checking which one you're actually hitting before you buy a card to solve the wrong one.

Thank you, this is really helpful. How would I tell the difference between the two failures? The error message just says the card isn't supported.

Open devtools, network tab, submit the form, look at the response body of the request that fails. FWIW most of these are Stripe-fronted and Stripe is verbose about why:

{
  "error": {
    "code": "card_declined",
    "decline_code": "card_not_supported"
  }
}

card_not_supported on a zero-amount setup intent is a BIN filter. card_declined with insufficient_funds on a $0 is the issuer refusing the account-verification auth, which is a completely different problem and one you can sometimes fix by leaving a few dollars on the card.

IME the second one accounts for more of these than people think, because everyone assumes BIN filtering the moment they see a rejection.

Checked four of them like you said. Two are card_not_supported, two are the zero-amount auth failing. So it was both, and I was treating it as one thing.

The two that were failing the auth both went through after I left $12 on the card. So that's half my problem gone for free. Thanks for this, genuinely - I'd have bought another card otherwise.

Wait so leaving a small balance fixes the $0 auth? That's huge, I've been fighting this for months!

It fixes one specific failure on one specific gateway. It is not a universal trick and it will not survive being repeated as one.

He posted the decline code. Read the decline code.

Actually for trials i use the voucher thing from Laso, is different model - you mint for the exact amount and after there is nothing left to charge. Works on maybe half the sites, the same as everything else.

But is nice for trial because when they try to bill you at day fifteen there is genuinely no money there, is not a decline you have to arrange.

That is a decline you arranged, you just arranged it in advance.

Doesn't matter for a SaaS trial. Does matter that half this board thinks an empty card is invisible. The merchant records the attempt, the failure, and the card that failed, and if the same seed funds your next card they can join those up whenever they decide to care.

Update in case anyone finds this later. Four of my six trials are running now - two were the balance fix, two took the card once I stopped using the same one everywhere.

The other two still refuse anything that isn't a bank-issued debit and I don't think there's a way around that without giving someone ID, so I've written those two off. Which is annoying because one of them was the tool I most wanted to try.

Not marking solved because two out of six isn't solved. But thank you all, especially PipelineRat for the devtools thing and hana_v for explaining the BIN part properly.

the balance thing worked for me too