In Spain at least I have two small alternatives to this:

• Paypal (I don’t like it too much, but it works fine).
• A prepaid credit card offered through my bank. Good for sites that don’t look too trustworthy but I need to buy from. I just activate it, load it with whatever amount I need, I make the transaction, then disable it again. Even if it gets leaked no one can take any money out.

For everything else I have a virtual credit card number that’s not dynamic, but at least it’s something I use exclusively for online stuff.

Here you get a debit card by default with your bank account, and that one’s free. You might get a credit one, but credit limits are typically low. I lived in Canada for 9 years and by the time I left I had a CC with a limit of 26k CAD. Here my Spanish credit card has a limit of 1.2k euros, and I’ve had it for quite a long time.

In Spain at least there’s quite a lot of confusion with this. People call any card type a “credit card”, even debit ones.

I’ve been using Fastmail for a few years and I’m quite happy with the service. Being a semi-large organization I expect their security to be OK, but if anyone has comments on that aspect I welcome them.

As for privacy, I always consider e-mail to be a postcard. If I want to encrypt something, I use GPG locally.