Authoryze is built for the purchase most agents actually need to make: buying something at a merchant with a card. A request comes in over MCP, rules are evaluated server-side, a person approves anything over the threshold, and a single-use card is issued for that one merchant and amount, accepted anywhere Visa or Mastercard is accepted online. Teams share one envelope with approvers and a record per member and agent. Locus shares the philosophy that agents should only spend within defined rules, with justification and a full audit trail, but it focuses on a different payment: agents paying for services, paywalled data, and other agents through a catalog of pay-per-use tools.
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 card per approved purchase, through the card networks' agentic programs (Visa Intelligent Commerce and Mastercard Agent Pay) | 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, including Claude, ChatGPT, and Meta's Muse | MCP server and plugin for developer tools |
| Spend controls | Per-transaction caps, daily/weekly/monthly limits, merchant allow/blocklists, aggregate caps across agents | 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 approval flow by email and dashboard, with duplicate detection | Approval threshold with an Approvals tab in the dashboard |
| Teams | Shared team envelope, approvers, per-member and per-agent records, one monthly plan | Per-wallet budgets and policy groups |
| Audit | Full logged purchase history | Traceable, auditable, reconcilable payments |
Merchant Purchases vs Agent Payouts
The core difference is the kind of payment. Authoryze is built for a card purchase at a merchant. The agent asks with a justification, the rules engine decides, an approver steps in only when the amount is over the threshold, and the agent gets a single-use card directly from retrieve_card. Duplicate requests are caught before a second card exists.
Locus is built for the machine economy: an agent paying for an API, a dataset, compute, or another specialist agent, with a broad policy engine for that kind of spend. Its own rails are USDC on Base and a card-funded credit balance. 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.
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, shared team envelopes, and a full audit trail.
Sources
Locus claims on this page were checked on September 16, 2026 against paywithlocus.com, its pricing page (paywithlocus.com/pricing), spending limits page (paywithlocus.com/use-cases/ai-agent-spending-limits), commercial plans docs (docs.paywithlocus.com/locus-pro/commercial-plans), platform walkthrough (docs.paywithlocus.com/platform-walkthrough), Laso docs (docs.paywithlocus.com/features/laso), and the locus-technologies/locus-pro-plugin repository on GitHub. If something has changed since, let us know.
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