Almost every subscription asks to keep your card. The request is framed as a favour to you: faster next time, one less thing to remember, no interruption to the service. All of that is true, and none of it is the reason the box exists.
A card on file is a standing permission to take money from you without asking again. That is not a criticism of the practice — plenty of services genuinely need it — but it is worth naming accurately before deciding whether a yearly subscription is one of them. This is what the permission covers, what refusing it actually costs, and why we do not ask for it.
What a card on file actually is
Two separate things get bundled under the phrase, and separating them makes the rest of this much clearer.
The first is technical. A seller who stores your card usually does not hold the number. Their payment company keeps it and hands back a token — a reference that works for charges to that one seller and is worthless anywhere else. This part of the arrangement is generally well built and is not where the risk sits.
The second is contractual, and it is the part that matters. Alongside the token sits your authority for that seller to initiate future payments on their own, without you present and without a fresh approval. In card scheme language these are merchant-initiated transactions, and the whole point of them is that they happen while you are doing something else entirely.
So the honest description of the tick box is not "we will remember your card". It is "you agree we may charge you again later, at a time and figure we set, unless you take action to stop us". Both sentences describe the same arrangement. Only one of them is on the checkout page.
Who the convenience is really for
Weigh the benefit honestly on both sides, because a stored card is not a swindle and pretending otherwise would be as misleading as the checkout copy.
| What it delivers | To the buyer | To the seller |
|---|---|---|
| Time saved | Around 90 seconds, once a year | None directly |
| No gap in service | Real, if you would otherwise forget | Real, and worth a great deal |
| The decision to continue | Removed — you are not asked | Removed — you are not asked |
| Who must act to change things | You, before the renewal date | Nobody |
| Predictable revenue | Nothing | The entire commercial case |
Read down the two columns and the asymmetry is plain. One side saves a minute and a half a year. The other side converts a decision that would otherwise have to be won again into one that happens by default. That is a large prize, which is why the request is on practically every checkout on the internet.
The default that decides everything
Everything about a stored card comes down to what happens when nobody does anything, because that is the outcome most likely to occur.
With a card on file, silence means the payment repeats. You continue paying for a service you have stopped using until you notice and cancel, and the noticing is the hard part — a modest annual figure on a statement full of other lines is close to invisible.
Without one, silence means the arrangement ends. If a service turned out to be mediocre and you never got round to a decision, the outcome is that you stop paying. If it was good, you pay again on purpose, having weighed it.
The stored card does not just save you a minute. It moves the burden of acting from the seller, who wants your renewal, to you, who might not want to give it.
Neither default is dishonest on its own. But a business that only survives when people forget to cancel it is a business built on inattention, and a yearly plan is where that shows up most sharply — twelve months is long enough for anyone to lose track of a small recurring line.
What a stored credential exposes you to
The security question deserves a precise answer rather than a scary one. Stored cards are usually tokenised, and a tokenised credential leaking is far less damaging than a spreadsheet of card numbers. The exposure is real but narrower than the headlines suggest.
What it does create is a live payment relationship sitting idle. Anyone who ends up controlling the seller's account — a departing employee, an attacker who phished a login, a new owner after the business changes hands — inherits the ability to trigger a charge against everyone on that list. No card number needs to leak for that to happen.
It also multiplies quietly. Most people have stored cards with a dozen or more services and could not name half of them from memory. Each is a small standing permission granted at a moment when the only thing on their mind was finishing a purchase. The aggregate is a set of open doors nobody is keeping track of.
And it complicates the exit. A charge you did not expect from a merchant you did once agree to is one of the harder cases to unwind, precisely because the authority existed. The narrow shape of what a card can undo is set out in what a chargeback will and will not reverse.
What refusing it costs you
There is a genuine cost, and it would be dishonest to write eight sections praising a model without stating it clearly.
You can lapse by accident. Nobody is keeping the service alive on your behalf, so if you meant to continue and the date passed while you were busy, the picture stops. That is the actual downside of paying on purpose, and it is a real inconvenience rather than a theoretical one.
You also re-enter details once a year, which is ninety seconds, and you cannot set it up and forget it, which some people genuinely prefer. If you have a service you know you want for the next five years, a stored card is a reasonable thing to want.
The lapse risk has a cheap fix: a calendar entry a week before the expiry date, made on the day you buy. That single reminder recovers most of the convenience a stored card offers while leaving the decision in your hands. Keep it with the paperwork, alongside the end date on your payment receipt.
How renewal works without one
In practice the sequence is short. A reminder reaches you before the expiry date, quoting the plan and the current price. If you want to continue, you pay again through whichever route suits you that year, and the twelve months extend from the old end date rather than the day you happened to get round to it — so paying a few days early costs you nothing.
If you do not want to continue, you do nothing. There is no cancellation flow, no retention offer, no sequence of screens asking whether you are sure. Nothing to cancel is a stronger position than an easy cancellation, because it does not depend on the seller keeping that flow easy next year.
The other consequence is that the price is checkable in advance. A stored card means next year's figure is whatever the seller sets and you find out afterwards. Paying deliberately means you see the number first, and ours stays published on the pricing page rather than being quoted privately at renewal time.
Checking who already has yours
This applies well beyond one subscription, and it is worth half an hour once.
- Read a full statement line by line. Not a summary — an actual month, and preferably one from a quarter when annual charges land. Most people find at least one thing they had forgotten they were paying for.
- Delete stored cards where the option exists. A billing or payment methods section that lets you remove a card without contacting anyone is a good sign about the seller generally.
- Put the request in writing where it does not. Ask for the card to be removed and for confirmation once it is done. Keep the reply; it is worth more than the promise.
- Use the issuer as the backstop. Most banks can block future charges from a named merchant, and replacing a card ends every stored arrangement attached to it in one move.
- Ask about removal before you ever store one. A seller who cannot describe how to take a card off file is answering a different question than the one you asked, and the answer is still useful.
Our position, and what it commits us to
We do not store cards, and the payment never touches our systems in a form we could store — the details go to the payment company, we get a confirmation that money arrived, and that is the extent of what we hold. There is no billing section on this site because there is nothing in it to manage.
The plans are $69 for one screen, $97 for two and $137 for three, twelve months, one payment, no automatic second charge. Card, Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal and cryptocurrency are all accepted at the same figure, with the differences between them set out on the payment methods page.
This commits us to something specific, and that is the point of writing it down. It means we have to earn a renewal every year with a service that still works and a price that has not quietly moved, rather than relying on a permission granted twelve months ago by somebody who has since stopped thinking about it. If the year goes badly, we lose the renewal, and that is the correct outcome.
If you would rather be reminded before the expiry date, say so when you order and the desk on the contact page will note it. A reminder you asked for is a different thing from a charge you did not — and the whole of our safety page is built on that distinction.
