Launch

Allowance: Virtual Cards for AI Agents

Let AI shop for you without exposing your card, using one-time virtual cards with approval controls and built-in limits.

Dasmer Singh Founder of Allowance
3 min read
Allowance approval screen for a $200 purchase at Alo beside the message 'Approve every purchase.'

TL;DR: Allowance lets AI agents safely make purchases on your behalf using one-time virtual cards with built-in guardrails.

Originally published on Launch YC on May 22, 2026.

The problem

AI agents can now browse websites, research products, and complete real-world tasks autonomously, but they cannot complete purchases for you.

Using AI to buy something has usually meant pasting your real credit card into a prompt and giving an agent unrestricted spending access. That's dangerous.

The solution

Allowance gives AI agents one-time virtual cards with approval controls and built-in limits. The AI agent never sees your real card number.

With Allowance, you can:

  • Limit spending amounts.
  • Restrict purchases to specific merchants.
  • Approve or deny purchases in real time.
  • Revoke access at any time.
  • Continue using your existing credit cards and rewards.

This unlocks new ways for AI to help:

  • Plan and book travel, hotels, and flights within limits you define.
  • Track out-of-stock products and buy them when inventory returns.
  • Place food orders and complete ticket or ecommerce checkouts on your behalf.
  • Monitor prices and buy when something drops below your target.
  • Handle repetitive purchases and checkouts across the web.

Progress in AI agents, browser automation, and payment protocols makes it increasingly clear that agents will transact across the internet on our behalf. Safe guardrails and user-controlled payment permissions are the missing layer that makes this possible.

I've been using Allowance to make real-world purchases through AI agents, including food orders, reservations, and ecommerce checkouts.

Why I built Allowance

I started building Allowance after running into this problem myself while trying to book a reservation using OpenClaw. The agent successfully navigated the flow, but then asked me to paste in my credit card number to hold the reservation.

That felt fundamentally wrong. It made the missing layer for agentic commerce obvious: safe, user-controlled payments.

Try Allowance

Allowance is live. Set up your desktop agent and tell me what you use it for, how it could better fit into your life, and which purchasing guardrails you want next.

Share LinkedIn Share on X