Stripe's Link wallet for agents lets a person's AI agent pay with the cards already saved in their Link wallet. The agent requests a spend, the person approves it in the Link app, and the agent receives a one-time-use card or shared payment token. It is built for one person and one personal agent. If you want rules instead of taps, more than one agent, or a team sharing a budget, here are the alternatives, with Authoryze first because it is ours.
What Link for agents does and where it stops
Link ships as a CLI and skill files that an agent installs in its runtime. Stripe's README for the CLI says the person approves every purchase, within 10 minutes of the request, and the credential is valid for 12 hours. The caps are $500 per spend request, $500 per day, and $20,000 per 30 days, with higher limits through Stripe sales. It is available to US Link accounts only. Granular controls for when an agent can spend without approval are listed on link.com as coming soon, not shipped. All of that was checked against Stripe's docs on September 16, 2026.
Those defaults are limiting for anyone running more than one agent, anyone who wants rules instead of taps, anyone running agents as a team, anyone outside the US, or anyone whose agent is hosted and cannot shell out to a CLI.
Authoryze
Authoryze is an MCP server with a rules engine in front of a single-use virtual card. The agent calls request_purchase, the server evaluates per-transaction limits, daily, weekly, and monthly caps, a total budget, merchant allowlists, and account-wide aggregate caps across every agent, then either denies, approves, or routes the request to you. In-policy requests under your auto-approve threshold go through with no tap. Approved requests get a single-use card directly from retrieve_card, issued through the card networks' agentic programs (Visa Intelligent Commerce and Mastercard Agent Pay).
Claude and ChatGPT connect over OAuth. Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and custom agents connect over OAuth or an API key. Meta's Muse connects over MCP too, and a real purchase went through it end to end in October 2026. There is no CLI to install inside the agent and no skill file to keep current.
Teams have been live since September 29, 2026. One admin funds a shared team envelope with a single passkey, the team's approvers decide purchases over the threshold without the admin, members' agents draw from the envelope, and every purchase is recorded per member and per agent. Routing a request to one specific named approver is not live yet.
Individuals pay 1.5% per transaction with a $0.50 minimum, no subscription, and their first 5 transactions free. Teams pay one monthly plan on one billing card: Team Starter is $39.99 a month for up to 100 transactions, Team Pro is $174.99 a month for up to 500, each transaction past either is $0.40, and a new team gets 20 free transactions. The full head-to-head is at Authoryze vs Stripe Link for agents, and how to set spending limits for an AI agent covers the rules in detail.
The honest tradeoff: Authoryze asks you to enroll a card and set rules, which is more setup than tapping approve in a wallet you already have.
Crossmint
Crossmint launched an Agentic Cards API in June 2026 that lets agents pay with credentials derived from an existing Visa card over Visa Intelligent Commerce, with Mastercard and American Express support announced as in progress. Its marketing describes spending limits, merchant whitelisting, and approval thresholds, and its lobster.cash tool installs into Claude Code, OpenClaw, and other agent platforms. Most of its platform is stablecoin wallets, x402, and multi-chain payments. Card pricing is quote-only through sales. If an agent buying at merchants on a card is the whole job, that is more surface area than you need. See Authoryze vs Crossmint.
Nekuda
Nekuda's public product today is WebMCP tooling, which lets merchant websites expose actions to agents. Its earlier payments SDK, a wallet that stores and injects a user's card at checkout plus signed mandates recording authorization, is no longer documented, and we could not confirm whether it is still offered. It is not a managed spend-control layer with a live approval gate. See Authoryze vs Nekuda.
Skyfire
Skyfire is identity-first. Its Know Your Agent protocol issues signed tokens that prove who an agent is and what it is authorized to spend, with pay tokens suited to micropayments and agent-to-agent transactions that card rails handle badly. Wallets can be funded by card, ACH, or USDC. Skyfire runs an MCP server, and pricing is through sales. It has no per-transaction approval step for a person reviewing a merchant purchase. See Authoryze vs Skyfire.
Payman
Payman's 2025 developer platform gave agents wallets funded in USD over ACH or in USDC, with policies that capped what an agent could move to pre-registered payees, aimed at contractor, payroll, and vendor payouts. In 2026 it repositioned toward agentic banking for financial institutions and a consumer bank-link agent called Genie. It does not issue cards, and its developer docs are offline. See Authoryze vs Payman.
How to choose
Start from the job. If your agents buy things at merchants on a card and you want server-side rules, more than one agent, aggregate caps, team envelopes with approvers, and an MCP connection that works with Claude, ChatGPT, and Muse out of the box, that is what Authoryze is built for. The others cover different payment shapes: crypto rails, website tooling, agent identity and micropayments, and payouts. The comparison index has every head-to-head page, and what to look for in AI agent payment infrastructure lists the questions to ask any of them.
Common questions
Is Stripe Link for agents the same as Stripe's Agentic Commerce Protocol?
No. The Agentic Commerce Protocol is merchant-side. It lets a business accept a purchase from an agent inside an assistant. Link for agents is buyer-side. It lets a person's agent pay from that person's wallet. We compare the merchant-side product separately in Authoryze vs Stripe Agentic Commerce.
Can I let a Link agent spend without approving each purchase?
Not as of September 2026. Stripe's docs require approval of every spend request, and link.com lists controls for spending without approval as coming soon. Authoryze supports this today through an auto-approve threshold and optional spending envelopes.
Which alternative works with Claude and ChatGPT without a CLI?
Authoryze connects to both over OAuth as a custom connector or MCP server. Crossmint and Skyfire have MCP servers, and Crossmint names Claude Code among its supported platforms. We did not find a first-party ChatGPT connector documented for the others, so treat that as unconfirmed rather than absent.
Does any of these avoid giving the agent a card number?
No. Every card-based option here, including Link and Authoryze, returns some card credential to the agent so it can check out. The difference is whether that credential is single-use and scoped to one amount, and whether your real card stays out of the agent's reach. Virtual cards for AI agents explains what that scoping buys you.
Ready to try the alternative built for rules rather than taps? Create an Authoryze account and connect your first agent in about ten minutes.