is it actually dumb to put the tools on my normal debit card

everything i pay for goes on my normal debit card right now. hosting, two subscriptions, a scraper thing

is that actually a problem or is everyone just being paranoid. its like 60 quid a month total, im not running anything big

it's a problem the day one of them gets breached and it's the card your rent comes out of

Not paranoia, but the reason is more boring than the one people usually give.

At £60 a month across three services the risk isn't that someone traces you. It's that one of those services has a billing dispute, or gets compromised, or auto-renews at a price you didn't agree to, and the card involved is the one your life runs on. Freezing that card because of a scraper subscription is a genuinely bad afternoon.

A second card — any second card — fixes that, and it doesn't need to be anonymous or clever. What it does need to be is one that survives recurring charges, because a lot of prepaid and virtual cards take the first payment happily and then decline the monthly renewal, which is worse than not having one. Test it on your cheapest subscription before you move hosting onto it.

If you want to compare specific options, the Crypto Cards & Prepaid board is where people post which ones actually hold up on recurring billing. That's a better source than one recommendation from me.

There is also a mundane advantage that has nothing to do with security: at the end of the year you can see what the venture cost you, on one statement, without picking it out of your grocery shopping.

I realise that is not why anyone here does it; it is nonetheless the reason I would give someone spending sixty a month. Separation is an accounting habit before it is an operational one.

Sixty quid a month is not a business. It is a subscription to feeling like one.