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

https://youtu.be/i-V5uPtKEew

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 usually has meant pasting your real credit card into a prompt and giving an agent unrestricted spending access. That’s dangerous.

The Solution

Allowance solves this by giving AI agents one-time virtual cards with approval controls and built-in limits. The AI agent never sees the user’s real card number.

Users can:
• limit spending amounts
• restrict purchases to specific merchants
• approve or deny purchases in real time
• revoke access anytime
• continue using their existing credit cards and rewards

This unlocks entirely new use cases for AI-powered commerce:
• planning and booking travel, hotels, and flights autonomously within user-defined limits
• tracking products that are out of stock and instantly purchasing them when inventory returns
• securely placing food orders, reservations, ticket purchases, and ecommerce checkouts on a user’s behalf
• monitoring prices and automatically buying when something drops below a target price
• using AI not just to research products, but to actually complete the purchase end-to-end
• letting agents handle repetitive purchases and checkouts across the web

The recent progress in AI agents, new payment protocols, and browser automation makes it increasingly clear that agents will eventually transact across the internet on behalf of users. Safe guardrails and user-controlled payments infrastructure are the missing layer that makes this possible.

I’ve been using Allowance to place real-world purchases through AI agents including food orders, reservations, and ecommerce checkouts using one-time virtual cards with approval controls.

The Ask

Try the product, tell me what you’re using it for, how it could better fit into your life, and share feedback. Start here: useallowance.com

I’d especially love to hear new ideas for agentic purchasing use cases and guardrails.

About Me

I’m Dasmer, founder of 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 — and made it obvious the missing layer for agentic commerce was safe, user-controlled payments.
Before Allowance, I was Head of Product for Cash App Families, where I helped grow Cash App into the most popular debit card for teens in the US. Earlier in my career, I was also an early iOS engineer at Venmo.