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.
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.
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
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:
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?
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.
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.