One card per campaign — who does issuance cheap enough to make that work?

Caveat before the question, because someone will tell me the premise is wrong and they might be right. What I want is one card per campaign, so that when one gets flagged it takes down that campaign's card and nothing else.

I run somewhere between eight and fourteen live at a time. Spend per campaign is anywhere from a couple of hundred to a couple of thousand a month. 1) I need to issue on demand, same day, no waiting on a human. 2) I need to fund from USDT. 3) The issuance cost has to be small enough that spinning up a card for a test campaign is not a decision I have to think about.

It's 3 that keeps stopping me. Everything I look at either takes a percentage on issuance or wants a minimum first deposit that makes a $200 test look silly.

Who is actually doing this, and what are you paying per card?

you're framing it as an issuance fee problem. it's a minimum deposit problem. ask about that instead and the list gets very short

Run the arithmetic before you pick, because at twelve cards a month the ranking flips depending on what you load.

Card	Issuance	Top-up	Cost of 12 cards at $500 each
Vyrion	$1	1%	$72
PrivCards	$1.50	2%	$138
PayPaw	$2 + 3%	3%	$384
SolCard	$10	5%	$420

The PayPaw number looks wrong until you notice the 3% is charged on issuance as well as top-up, which is the thing their pricing page does not make obvious.

At $500 a card the flat fee is noise and the percentage is everything. At $80 a card the flat fee is most of it. You gave a range of a couple of hundred to a couple of thousand, so you are going to land in both regimes and one card will not be optimal for both. Pick for the tail you issue most of.

That table is a game changer, saving it. Didn't know about the issuance percentage at all!

Twelve to twenty cards a month at those fees is a rounding error. The minimum deposit is not.

Had this exact setup last year, different vertical - twenty-odd cards live at once, one per buying account rather than per campaign, which is close enough.

Vyrion is what I settled on and it's still what I'd point you at. Dollar issuance and a flat 1% on top-up means the per-card overhead basically disappears at your spend, and the caps are high enough that you'll never see them - ten grand a transaction, hundred a month.

Here's the part that will actually decide it for you though, and it's the reason I nearly didn't use them: there's a $150 minimum on the first deposit per card. So your $200 test campaign works fine, but if you were hoping to spin up a card with $40 on it to see whether a placement converts, you can't. That single number is the difference between this being a good fit and a bad one for you.

Also worth saying, it's the newest brand in the category. Shortest track record of any of them. I don't leave balances sitting on it - I load a card, spend it, let it go dead. What's your typical first load on a test?

How many cards a month is this actually? Eight to fourteen live is not the same as eight to fourteen issued, and every recommendation in here depends on which one you meant.

Twelve to twenty issued in a month, closer to twenty in a bad month. Live at any one time is the eight to fourteen. Should have said.

And to answer the other question - first load on a test is usually $150 to $250, so that minimum is survivable. Not thrilled about it but survivable.

same setup here. did the min deposit ever change

My friend, actually the table is good but is missing one thing for people like me. Is not only the fee, is the cap.

If you do one card per campaign and you are in LATAM, Laso for example is the same idea already - you mint a voucher, you spend it, nothing is left over. Sounds perfect for this. But the cap is 1000 USD a month across everything, not per card, so with twelve campaigns you finish the month in the first week.

So my point - ask about monthly limit per account and not per card. Some of them count all your cards together and they do not say this anywhere.

This is the correct warning and it catches people out constantly. Per-card caps are advertised, account-level caps are usually only in the terms.

For what it's worth the two Marta is choosing between both publish per-transaction and monthly numbers that are account-level, and both are high enough that twenty cards at two thousand won't touch them.

Twenty cards a month. Sure. Nothing about that pattern looks unusual to an issuer.

he's got a point and it's the only real risk here. issuers don't care what you spend on, they care about velocity. twenty cards a month from one seed is a pattern whether you like it or not

then split across two providers and stop worrying about it

Six weeks in, reporting back because this thread got me most of the way there.

1. Went with the dollar-issuance option for anything over $150 and it's been exactly as described - twenty-three cards issued since, no issuance problems, one card declined at a platform and that was the platform not the card. 2) Kept a second provider for the sub-$150 tests, which is the split 0xLumen suggested and it also quietly solves the velocity thing. 3) Total fee cost across those twenty-three cards was under €90, which against the spend is nothing.

The thing I got wrong going in: I thought the issuance fee was the constraint. It was the minimum deposit, exactly as grindstone said in the second post. Marking solved.