Prepaid Card APIs: What to Look For, What to Avoid, & How to Ship Fast

A prepaid card API provider helps you issue virtual or physical prepaid cards through your own product, ideally with the controls and reporting your team needs. A good provider the engine behind many of today’s top payout and incentive programs. 

Your choice of API providers will impact your speed to launch, along with your risks and recipient experience. So, it’s important to choose wisely! 😉

In this article, we’ll cover how to find a prepaid card API provider that meets your unique needs, from the features that actually matter to the questions you should ask before you build. 

TL;DR: What matters most when picking a prepaid card API provider?

Look for reliability and clarity: predictable docs, idempotent endpoints, and on going support.

Commercial fit matters, too. You want clear, transparent pricing, realistic SLAs, and a support model that matches your team’s needs.

→ Early on, you should also decide if you only need to send prepaid cards (network-branded, spend anywhere the network is accepted), like a Visa® incentive card or bulk virtual prepaid Mastercard®, or if you’d also want the ability to send merchant-specific digital gift cards (like an Amazon card). Ideally, you’ll find a provider that supports both through a single API.

What is a prepaid card API provider?

A prepaid card API provider like Giftbit gives your team programmatic access to create and manage prepaid cards inside your product. 

In other words, it’s an API you’d use to issue prepaid cards—virtual or physical—within your existing app, platforms, or software.

You’ll see providers differ on whether they support open-loop prepaid cards (Visa, Mastercard) in addition to brand-specific gift cards. Even if you’re only planning on using one type of incentive for now, it’s usually best to find a provider that offers both reward types, to future-proof your build. 

Note: at Giftbit, we often refer to our API as a ‘gift card API’ to keep things simple. But don’t let that jargon fool you—this one API gives you access to our entire global rewards catalog, which includes over 1000 brands and retailer gift cards, plus prepaid cards with near-universal coverage.

Open Loop vs Closed Loop?

In industry parlance, there are two main types of incentive cards you can offer your recipients: open loop cards and closed loop cards. You’ll find that we all tend to casually refer to all types of cards as ‘gift cards,’ but there are some critical technical differences. 

Prepaid cards are considered ‘open loop,’ because they use an ‘open’ payment network (Visa and Mastercard, for example). As such, they make for incredibly flexible digital rewards. 

Meanwhile, gift cards to specific retailers are called ‘closed loop,’ because they are closed to that one retailer network. So, for example, you can only spend a Starbucks gift card at Starbucks.  

Learn more → Open Loop vs Closed Loop Gift Cards: How To Pick The Right Incentive 

Who uses prepaid card APIs and for what?

All sorts of teams use prepaid/gift card APIs when they need fast, controlled, and often global payouts at scale. 

Use cases are quite broad here: as long as you’ve got some software to work with, plus some people you’d like to send cards to, then you’ve got a solid argument to start using a prepaid card API. You’ll be joining countless product, ops, finance, HR, and CX teams that already use them to send money-like value without added manual work.

Ultimately, use cases will vary, but the pattern stays the same: you want rewards, refunds, stipends, or goodwill gestures to arrive instantly and be easy to track.

💡 Pro-tip: Use an API to enable microreward payouts if you’re planning an engagement-heavy program. 
Small, frequent incentives can keep users incredibly committed, especially when they’re delivered instantly. 

If you operate across markets or have mixed audiences, the right gift card/prepaid card provider will let you send brand gift cards and open-loop prepaid cards under one roof. That flexibility keeps your build simple while still meeting different regional and complex recipient needs. 

👀 Top use cases at a glance:

• Customer incentives and loyalty payouts triggered by product events. 
• Research participation and survey rewards, including tiny amounts at massive scale. 
• Employee recognition rewards, stipends, SPIFFs, and spot bonuses, delivered by email, SMS, in-app, QR codes, or links. 
• Affordable and engaging trade show giveaways. 
• Customer support make-goods and refunds where speed and transparency matter.
• Platform-to-recipient disbursements where you want a single API to handle both gift and prepaid options. 

Gift cards vs prepaid cards: how to choose what you need

Like we’ve covered, gift cards are usually meant for a single brand or a family of brands, while prepaid cards are network-branded and work wherever that network is accepted. 

If your card program needs broad, spend-anywhere utility, prepaid Visa or Mastercard tend to be a great fit. 

That said, prepaid card programs can also come with extra details that you’ll want to confirm before getting started—things like activation fees,* domestic-only rules, or app requirements for recipients. So be sure to ask these questions before you start building. 

*Note: Giftbit’s Visa Incentive Card does not have an activation fee. Your recipients will get the full value of whatever you are sending. 

But if you want brand affinity or merchant-specific value, gift cards often make more sense. For example, a Home Depot gift card can make for a great realtor incentive, while a hair stylist looking to boost referrals might prefer to align with big-name beauty brands like Sephora. 

💡 Pro-tip: Curating a list of gift card brands can work incredibly well for some incentive use cases. For example, if you’d like to offer a free lunch as a sales door-opener, you might want to let your recipients choose between food delivery services like DoorDash and Uber Eats. Or you might want to treat your remote team to a coffee during your next Zoom call, in which case you’d want the ability to send them a curated list of coffee gift card brands.   

Ideally, you’ll want both gift cards and prepaid cards in your integration, so you can stay flexible as needs grow and change. 

In other words, don’t assume that just because you’ve only been asked to integrate Visa cards for now, that that’s all you’ll ever need. 

Who knows when your executive team might come to you and say they’d like the ability to send sustainable corporate gifts that are more in line with company values than what they’re currently using? 

Or when your HR team might see how easy you’ve made things and decide they want to start sending affordable staff appreciation gifts and/or better bulk holiday gifts? 

How to issue prepaid cards via API integration

Issuing prepaid cards by API is a simple workflow once you know the moving pieces. The core idea: your system sends an order with who to reward, what to send (e.g., a Visa prepaid card) in what amount. The API takes the order and delivers the reward. 

Build for reliability from day one. Use idempotency (a unique client order reference) on create calls so retries don’t double-send rewards. Confirm there’s a stable testbed/sandbox to mimic production behavior, and scan the docs to ensure consistent request/response fields across endpoints. These ingredients save hours when you scale or debug.

Make delivery fit your program. Many teams trigger instant sends right after an event (a purchase, survey, or milestone) and let the API handle fulfillment asynchronously in the background while recipients still get their cards in seconds. If you prefer to stockpile rewards, generate direct links in batches and deliver them when your workflow calls for it. Either way, you own the timing; the API handles the heavy lifting.

🐿️ In a nutshell: use one integration, set clear guardrails, and enjoy fast delivery. Keep the flow simple, treat idempotency as mandatory, and lean on a provider with a solid sandbox and catalog so your team can ship rewards with confidence.

What makes for easy reward card integration?

Fast, easy API integration comes down to using a predictable, reliable API. You’ll hit the ground running if you find a prepaid card API with consistent endpoints, true idempotency, and a free test environment that mirrors production. 

In short, documentation must match behavior—full stop. 

📌 Prepaid card API providers can differ wildly in the formats and features they offer. Some add activation fees, limit spend to domestic purchases, or even make recipients download a separate app just to access their cards. 

TL;DR: If Visa or Mastercard is part of your incentive plan, read the fine print and ask directly about these constraints before you commit.

What separates virtual card API providers from each other?

At the highest level, any gift card or prepaid card API is going to let you layer reward delivery into your existing workflows and business operations. How reliably, quickly, easily, and affordability they let you do this is what separates them. 

Visibility into your program is going to be one of the most important differentiators. 

That means you’ll want the nitty-gritty details of how your program is actually performing. Are emails getting delivered? Are links being claimed? 

This matters because program success depends on what you can measure. Emails bounce, links get missed, and recipients sometimes want a different option than what you’ve sent. In short, just because you send a reward, doesn’t mean someone’s going to use it. 

Giftbit’s CEO Leif Baradoy puts it simply: “If we know, you know.”

Many (perhaps most) prepaid and gift card distributors intentionally add friction to the redemption process to boost their breakage revenue. They earn more when your recipients don’t use their rewards, which is why they may be evasive when you ask what happened to the rewards you sent.

But this approach dramatically undermines long-term program success. At Giftbit, we don’t optimize for breakage. Instead, we focus on making the recipient experience as smooth and effective as possible.

So the right API gives you financial clarity and operational traceability. You can pass an idempotent request ID with your own metadata—order number, timestamp, recipient ID—so reconciliation across systems is straightforward.

💡 Pro-tip: Recipient experience is another major API separator that can be easily overlooked in the discovery phase.  

Look for instant delivery options, simple activation, and support paths that resolve common questions fast. 

Ideally, your API provider will handle any recipient issues that pop up, so you can focus on the big picture. 

Transparent and flexible funding (i.e. how much is all this going to cost you?)

Pricing for prepaid card APIs should be predictable. You should have a clear total cost per reward so finance can forecast accurately.

Giftbit has made this all intentionally simple: no setup fees, no subscriptions, and no monthly minimums. You pay face value for the rewards you send (or less if you qualify for volume discounts or revenue sharing). If you send $50, your recipient gets $50—full stop. And there’s no activation fee on the digital card; the only extra is if you choose a physical Visa card, which carries a $4.95 per-card mailing charge.

You’ll also want funding to be flexible, especially if you operate globally. 

Look for a provider that offers multi-currency funding and automatic conversion so you don’t need separate bank accounts in every country. Giftbit supports simple funding in your preferred currency and lets you fund and send in multiple currencies from a single account—handy when you’re running regional campaigns from one budget.

Then make sure you can actually see the numbers. Detailed reporting should surface delivery status, redemption, and program costs—and, if you have negotiated economics, reflect discounts, margins, and revenue-share totals. If your program is large or embedded in your product, ask directly about bulk discounts and revenue sharing options. 

Finally, pressure-test the recipient experience, because hidden fees often show up there. Visa incentive cards issued through Giftbit are easy to activate and spend online and can be added to mobile wallets for in-store use. This means  there's no surprise deductions from recipient value, just a modern swipe-or-tap experience.

Some of the Giftbit dev team at work.

How culture impacts the API

Finally, culture is often the hidden variable behind API reliability. Teams that prize craft and ownership tend to ship APIs that behave predictably under load, match their docs, and make retries safe. 

A good culture shows up in day-to-day habits you can verify during discovery and pilots:

• Ownership over features. The people who build the API stay close to it and are first responders when something misbehaves. That shortens time to resolution and builds trust.
• Good-faith transparency. Clear terms, visible program status, and traceability instead of evasive answers when you ask what happened to a send.
• Security by default. Encryption in transit and at rest, least-privilege access, and thoughtful identifiers should be treated as table stakes, not bolt-ons. 

Bottom line: developer culture isn’t fluff. It’s a practical filter for prepaid card API partners—and a reliable predictor of how quickly your team will launch, scale, and sleep at night.

More key features to look for in a virtual card API provider

When assessing API providers for your rewards and payout programs, there are certain features that are going to make it easier for your team to ship with confidence.

Like we’ve covered, idempotency is critical for any API, especially for those that handle financial transactions. You’ll also want a fast setup and reliable uptime (in the 99.99% range). 

Beyond that, you’ll want to look for the following API features for sending rewards cards:

• Secure payments and data handling. Look for SOC 2 compliance, encryption in transit and at rest, and strong authentication like MFA. 
• Clear docs and consistent endpoints. It should be easy to create and send gift cards and prepaid cards, check balances, and pull reports. 
• A real sandbox for testing. You need a staging space to run API calls and end-to-end flows before production. That’s how you avoid surprises when real rewards start going out. Sign up for Giftbit’s free testbed here. 

And remember that operational fit matters as much as code. Be sure to ask about KYB flows, PCI scope, dispute handling, and what “day two” reporting looks like for finance and support.

What security checks matter when you add financial rewards to your workflow?

Always keep security top-of-mind when you’re moving money-like value. Assessing your risks will keep rollout fast and safe.

Start with a simple checklist your engineers and security folks can share:

• Authentication keys with role-based access control
• Minimal storage of sensitive data, with encryption at rest
• SOC 2, encrypted traffic, and strong operational controls

SOC 2 is an especially strong signal that your partner treats security the way you do.

“We became SOC 2 compliant to make our practices clearer and more legible for customers and leads,” says Bryan Dwyer, Giftbit Chief Product Officer. “Like I’ve said, from Day One we’ve built to strong security patterns. I saw SOC 2 as a priority because it really helps our customers get started faster.”

Start using a prepaid card API for better rewards and incentives

Choosing a prepaid card API comes down to a few non-negotiables: predictable docs that match behavior, true idempotency, clear total cost per reward, and a recipient flow that works without surprises. 

Add in visible reporting, strong security (SOC 2, encryption, MFA), and a support model that meets your team where it is. 

And if you need both brand gift cards and open-loop prepaid in one build, pick a provider and developer portal that offers both behind a single API so you’re covered now and later.

Next steps

1. Run a quick pilot in a real sandbox, 2) pressure-test idempotent retries and webhooks, 3) verify pricing (including any activation or physical-card fees), 4) check SLAs and escalation paths, and 5) review the recipient experience end-to-end. Nail those, and you’ll ship fast—and keep it stable at scale.
   
   

Need help getting your prepaid card API integrated? Want to talk volume discounts and revenue sharing? Book some time.