>I won't stand for opt-out credit card renewals on magazines You are entirely morally justified in this, and even though a lot of consumer facing businesses fi

>I won't stand for opt-out credit card renewals on magazines You are entirely morally justified in this, and even though a lot of consumer facing businesses find actual checks themselves troublesome at scale that's not excuse not to offer one-time CC transactions at least (and preferably a full range of e-payment methods). FWIW though there is a sort of hack a lot of cards offer that can be helpful for this sort of service (at least when you find it too important to be practical to just write off): virtual card numbers. They go under different branding at different places, Bank of America for example calls it "Shop Safe" or something like that IIRC. Effectively though you access the card provider's tool, put in a balance and expiration date, and it then generates a credit card number (including 'security code') that has that expiration and balance, and of course can be trivially cancelled at will. You can use it anywhere any other credit card would work. That allows creating a maximum budget payment upfront that you can then entirely forget about, it won't auto-rollover, and it can never be charged more then the balance set. I think the way most (all?) places have it set up the VCC also binds on first use, so even if it was leaked it can't be utilized anywhere else. It's a useful tool for this sort of situation since it puts the buyer back in the driver's seat. Rather then having to fight to cancel something, it's up to them to get more money out of you since they don't actually have a real card. Can also be handy for buying online from places you're not 100% confident in, you can set a balance at just the price and at least know your loss is limited there. Regrettably I don't know of any places that make this nearly as central and easy a feature as it should be, and not all banks offer it, but it comes in handy sometimes anyway.