One card per campaign, what are you issuing them from?

Currently running everything off three cards and I can't reconcile anything. When a campaign gets shut down mid-month I have a statement with six campaigns on it and no clean way to say what that one cost me.

What I want is one card per campaign, funded to roughly what I plan to spend, so the card is the budget and the statement is the report. Twelve to twenty live at a time, so I need to be able to issue them myself without asking anyone.

1. Not looking for the cheapest, looking for the one with an actual issuing API or at least a button that doesn't take four screens. 2) Top-up has to be same day.

What are people in this position actually using? And is one-per-campaign even the right axis or am I about to build a system I hate?

wrong axis. the platform ties the card to the account, not the campaign. one card per account or you've built a nice spreadsheet on top of the same risk

Are these your accounts or rented? Completely different answer and you haven't said.

Mix. Six are mine, the rest are agency accounts through two different providers.

On the agency ones I don't control billing at all — I fund a balance and they spend it. So really this is about the six, which does shrink the problem.

so six cards. you've talked yourself out of the question

Card per account, and then attribute campaign spend from the platform's own export rather than from the statement. That's the split that made this tractable for me.

The reason is that the statement can't tell you what you want anyway. Platforms bill in batches — you'll get one charge covering four campaigns across two days, and no card-level scheme fixes that because the merchant decides what a transaction is.

Layer	What it's good for
Card per account	Blast radius, and a hard cap on what one account can burn
Platform export	Campaign-level cost, to the cent
Tracker	Campaign-level revenue

The card is a fuse, not a report. Once I stopped asking it to be a report the whole thing got simpler.

For issue many card fast, you need business account somewhere that give virtual card with api. Some fintech do this, is normal product, not something special for us.

But careful — many of them close you when they see the merchant. Is not the volume, is the merchant name on twenty transaction per day. I lose one account like this after two month, they not even tell me why, just freeze and give money back in 30 day.

Anyway keep second option ready always. Is not if, is when.

Had this exact setup running last year - 14 cards, one per account, funded weekly.

The thing I'd tell past me is to write the account name on the card label and nothing else. I got clever and labelled them by campaign, then reused a card when a campaign ended, and three months later I had a card that had been four different things and a statement I couldn't read.

Also think about what happens when one gets declined at 11pm. If all six cards top up from one balance and that balance is empty, all six accounts stop at once - which looks a lot like a coordinated something to whoever reviews it. I stagger the top-ups by a couple of days each now for that reason alone.

What's your weekly spend across the six? Changes whether this is worth the effort.

Between four and seven thousand a week across the six, depending on what's live.

The staggered top-up point is one I hadn't thought about at all and it's obviously right.

I just use one card for everything and check the tracker, honestly at your spend I'd probably do the same thing lol

IME the one-card people find out why not when the card gets locked, at which point everything stops simultaneously and you're arguing with a fraud team while six accounts go into arrears.

Blast radius is the entire point. It's not an accounting decision.

This happened to me in 2022. Everything down for nine days. Never again.

Nine day. This is why one card is not saving money.

On the issuer question specifically — that conversation lives on the Crypto Cards & Prepaid board rather than here, and it's a moving target that gets re-litigated every few months, so whatever anyone names in this thread will be wrong by autumn.

The durable part of the answer: pick on issuing limits and how fast a card dies when you kill it, not on the fee. At twenty cards the per-card issue fee is noise next to one frozen balance.

Three weeks in, reporting back since a couple of people asked.

Went with card per account, six cards, labelled by account and never reused. Campaign attribution comes from the platform export into the same sheet as the tracker revenue, which took an afternoon to set up and has already answered two questions I'd been arguing with myself about for a month.

Top-ups staggered across four days. Two accounts fund on Monday, two Wednesday, two Friday.

What I got wrong in the original post: I wanted the card to be the budget, and the card can't be the budget because the platform decides when it charges. It can be the ceiling, which turns out to be the useful half. One account can now burn at most what's on its card and that's the thing I actually wanted, I just described it as an accounting problem.