Authoryze and Locus share a philosophy. Agents should only spend within defined rules, with justification and a full audit trail. They differ on what the agent is paying for. Locus (YC F25) focuses on agents paying for services, paywalled data, and other agents, the machine economy, through a catalog of thousands of pay-per-use tools with a policy engine and audit trails. Authoryze focuses on agents making purchases at merchants using a single-use virtual card, with per-agent and cross-agent limits and human approval when needed, connected over MCP.
Feature Comparison
| Feature | Authoryze | Locus |
|---|---|---|
| Primary use case | Agents buying at merchants with a card | Agents paying for services, data, and other agents |
| Payment model | Single-use virtual card per approved purchase | USDC on Base and prepaid credits for programmatic payouts; prepaid Visa via a third-party catalog tool |
| Integration | MCP-native via a single MCP server | MCP server and plugin for Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Grok, and OpenClaw |
| Spend controls | Per-transaction caps, daily/weekly/monthly limits, merchant allow/blocklists | Global lifetime, monthly, weekly, and daily caps, per-wallet budgets, policy groups, per-transaction limits, rate limits, endpoint allowlists |
| Justification | Required on requests | Agent reasoning captured in the audit trail |
| Human approval | Built-in email approval flow with duplicate detection | Approval threshold with an Approvals tab in the dashboard |
| Audit | Full logged purchase history | Traceable, auditable, reconcilable payments |
Merchant Purchases vs Agent Payouts
The core difference is the kind of payment. Locus is built for the machine economy, an agent paying for an API, a dataset, compute, or paying another specialist agent for work, with rules and audit so you know who got paid and why. Its policy engine is broad, with global caps, per-wallet budgets, endpoint allowlists, rate limits, and a configurable approval threshold that holds over-limit calls for a person in the dashboard. On controls alone, Locus is a serious product and closer to Authoryze than it was a year ago.
Where they still diverge is the card. Locus's own rails are USDC on Base and a card-funded credit balance for Locus Pro. Retail purchases go through Laso Finance, a third-party tool in the catalog that issues a non-reloadable prepaid Visa, US-only, with acceptance depending on whether the merchant takes prepaid cards. Authoryze is built for exactly that purchase. A request comes in over MCP, rules are evaluated, a person approves anything over the threshold, and a single-use card is issued for that one merchant and amount. If your agents pay for services and data programmatically, that is Locus's focus. If your agents make merchant purchases on a card with human oversight, that is what Authoryze does.
When Authoryze Is the Right Choice
Choose Authoryze if your agents make card purchases at merchants and you want MCP-native integration with per-agent and cross-agent limits, required justification, human approval over thresholds, duplicate-purchase protection, and a full audit trail.
Sources
Locus claims on this page were checked on September 16, 2026 against paywithlocus.com, its pricing page, spending limits page, commercial plans docs, platform walkthrough, Laso docs, and the locus-pro-plugin repo. If something has changed since, let us know.
More comparisons: Authoryze vs Crossmint · Authoryze vs Nekuda · Authoryze vs Payman · Authoryze vs Skyfire · Authoryze vs Stripe Link for agents · Authoryze vs Allowance