Okay! So the bootcamp has ruffled my feathers a bit. They're asking me to enter my credit card info into Heroku which is no big deal as long as I stay on the "free plan". So apparently Heroku requires this for the email features so it can validate the account thus keeping bots from spamming email or something like that (I googled it) and there's not really a way around it.

It's on the curriculum for setting up email notifications in Rails. I'm going to probably swing by the dollar store and pick up a check card so I don't have to put my actual card on the account just to bypass it because I don't feel too cozy about using my debit card for homework.