Allowance

The honest question with any agentic shopping tool is: what's the worst case if the bot goes off the rails? With Allowance the answer is bounded. The worst case is a charge at one merchant, under a cap you set, that expires on its own if you forget about it. That's a real improvement over handing a model your card digits and hoping the guardrails in the system prompt hold. We'd reach for this when the task is small, frequent, and annoying. Coffee orders, a reservation, a gift under $150 from a store you name, a limited-release ticket inside a price ceiling. The iMessage and WhatsApp flow matters more than it sounds: forward a link or a photo, describe what you want, approve in the same thread. No app switching, no checkout page. The One-Time Cards feature is quietly the most useful thing here for people who don't trust agents yet. You can generate a private card number for a single online checkout and keep your real card out of the merchant's database, rewards intact via Rewards Optimization. That works whether or not you ever let an AI shop for you. Where it bites: there's no documented team or employee spend policy, so finance departments should look elsewhere. There's no crypto or bank-transfer rail, so card-averse merchants are out. And every purchase needs your approval, which is the point, but it also means you can't set it and walk away for a week. Compared with Privacy.com, the pitch is different in kind rather than degree. Privacy.com is a human generating virtual cards. Allowance assumes a bot is at the keyboard and builds the permission model around that: merchant lock, expiry, receipt, revocation, all scoped per task. Treat it as the right architecture shipped early. Public beta means rough edges, and we'd keep limits tight for the first few months.