Has anyone run both PrivCards and Laso? Trying to work out which suits about a thousand a month.

I am looking for people who have actually used both rather than read both pricing pages; I have read both pricing pages.

The spend is steady and unexciting: roughly a thousand a month across fifteen or twenty online purchases, none of them large. On paper Laso's 3.8% costs me about thirty-eight dollars a month against PrivCards at twenty, which suggests the answer is obvious. But the voucher model means nothing sits in a balance between purchases, and Laso's thousand-a-month ceiling is not a ceiling for me; it is exactly my spend, which is its own kind of problem.

So: has anyone run both side by side for a month or more? I am more interested in what went wrong than in what the fee tables say.

Ran both for six weeks last year, at a higher number than yours, so weight it accordingly.

	PrivCards	Laso
Top-up / load	2%	3.8%
Issue	$1.50	none charged to me
Monthly cap	$50,000	$1,000
Per transaction	$5,000	n/a at my sizes
Failed purchases	3 of 61	5 of 44

The failure row is the only interesting one and n=105 is nowhere near enough to separate them. On cost at your volume PrivCards wins by about eighteen dollars a month and it isn't close.

The thing I'd actually flag: your spend being exactly the cap is the worst place to sit. One month at 1,050 and you're stuck until it resets.

Cost is the wrong axis.

On PrivCards there is a funded balance under a card number that exists whether you are using it or not. On Laso the value exists for as long as it takes to spend it and then there is nothing to freeze, seize or correlate.

Eighteen dollars a month is what that costs. Whether it is worth paying depends on your threat model, which nobody in this thread knows, including the person who started it.

Over how many months, and how many of them ended with a balance being frozen? I'll take the argument seriously the moment there's a number under it.

You will not get one. Nobody posts the month their balance went away, and the people it happened to are not here.

Absence of data in this category is not evidence of safety. It is selection.

he's right and you both know it. also eighteen quid a month to not think about it is nothing

Practical middle ground: keep the PrivCards balance near zero. Top up per purchase instead of monthly and you get most of what nullroute is describing at 2% rather than 3.8%.

It is more clicks. That is the whole downside.

That is a good answer and I had not considered it; thank you. It does turn one top-up a month into twenty, which is twenty entries rather than one, but the entries are the cheap part.

Twenty entries. A thousand pounds. Riveting.

Just to say for LATAM the laso limit is not the only issue my friend, the fiat presets are few. If you buy in a currency they dont have you pay the spread anyway, on top of the 3.8.

Actually i use privcards for this reason and top up small like hana_v say. Work fine for me almost two years.

following, roughly the same spend

Leaving it there. We have established that one of us wants a number and the other one thinks the number cannot exist, and both of those are correct, which is why this thread has nowhere left to go.