Gift Card APIs for Rewards Apps Compared (2026)

What is a gift card API for a rewards app?

A gift card API lets your server buy a digital gift card, prepaid card or cash-like payout from a reward provider and deliver it to a user, without you holding stock or signing deals with each brand. For a rewards app or GPT site, it is the engine behind the cashout page: a user redeems points, your server places an order, and the provider sends a code or a redemption link. Widely used providers in 2026 include Tremendous, Tango (now part of Blackhawk Network), Xoxoday Plum, Giftbit, Runa and Reloadly, and they differ most in pricing model, catalog reach and how they approve use cases.

Below: how these APIs work, a comparison built only from each provider’s own pages, and an order pattern that prevents duplicate payouts. Prices and policies were checked on October 22, 2026; confirm them before you sign up.

How gift card APIs work

The flow is almost identical across providers.

1. Business verification and use-case approval

You apply as a business, not a person. Tremendous asks for company documents such as articles of incorporation, a W-9 or a bank verification letter; Runa runs KYB and enhanced due diligence; Tango pre-approves each program. Expect questions about what your app does and who your users are. KYC for rewards sites covers the identity side for your own users.

2. Prefunding

You pay before you send. Every provider here works from a balance you top up, and orders draw it down. Bank transfers are usually free and card top-ups cost extra, so plan regular bank top-ups.

3. Catalog

The API returns products with an ID, countries, currency and allowed denominations. Brands change names, terms and denominations, so Tango’s best practices tell you to key decisions on its product ID (UTID). Sync the catalog on a schedule and hide products that disappear.

4. Order and delivery

You send the product, amount, currency and recipient, and the provider emails or texts the reward, or returns a link or code that you show in your app. Link delivery makes you responsible for a secret: Tremendous’s link delivery guide says links cannot be retrieved after creation and should not be stored.

5. Currency conversion

If your balance is in US dollars and the user picks a euro card, the provider converts at its own rate: Tremendous at order time, Xoxoday Plum at a daily locked rate. Users see a fixed card value while your cost moves, so price points with some headroom (see how to set your virtual currency exchange rate).

Gift card APIs compared

Everything below comes from each provider’s own pricing page, terms or developer docs, checked on October 22, 2026. “Contact sales” means we found no public price list.

Catalog counts are each provider’s own figures and are not comparable one to one: some count brands, some count products per country. Only the catalog endpoint tells you whether the brands your users want exist in their countries.

Provider notes

Tremendous

The Tremendous pricing page is the most detailed public price list in this group: no platform fee, gift cards and prepaid cards sent at face value, PayPal and Venmo at 4% with a $0.25 minimum (or passed to recipients at 6%), and 4 to 6% on bank transfers, Cash App and international digital wallets. Bank funding from the US, EU or UK is free.

Its production access guide says some businesses are off-limits, “including (but not limited to) crypto and gambling,” and links a prohibited list that also names money services businesses and virtual currency businesses. The corporate client terms (last updated May 15, 2026) limit accounts to business and government entities. An order approval feature lets an admin approve or reject pending orders, a useful manual check on large cashouts.

Tango

Tango is now a division of BHN (Blackhawk Network). The Tango terms and conditions are the strictest on use case: your program must be pre-approved, the service may only be used for a loyalty, reward, promotional or incentive program unless Tango approves otherwise in writing, rewards may not be resold, you must pre-pay before each order, and you warrant that you will not issue more than $10,000 in rewards to one recipient in one day. Inactive accounts can be charged a $100 a year dormancy fee after notice.

On the technical side, Tango’s best practices set a 1 request per second limit and make externalRefID idempotent per account. Line items can be cancelled, frozen, reissued or resent through the API, which helps when you catch fraud after an order but before redemption. API funding is by credit card only; ACH, wire and check go through the portal.

Xoxoday Plum

Plum’s pricing page has no public rates, but it explains the two models clearly. With “pay when you send,” your wallet is debited at issue, you get a discount on the recharge, and Xoxoday keeps unredeemed value. With “pay when it’s redeemed,” you are debited at redemption, keep unredeemed value, and pay a platform fee and per-transaction fee. Each wallet has one base currency, and end-user KYC is an add-on for high-value redemptions.

The Place Order API needs a unique poNumber for every order to avoid duplicates, and Xoxoday recommends storing the request and response of every call.

Giftbit

The Giftbit pricing page lists no subscription, platform or minimum fees: you pay face value, with a 2.9% fee if you fund by credit card and fixed fees on a few prepaid card types (for example $2.95 or $4.95 per physical US Visa incentive card). Currency conversion is free. Unclaimed promotional rewards with a claim-by date become “breakage,” and Giftbit shares part of that value back, 25% by default.

Runa

Runa does not publish prices; its docs say an order’s price is the face value less discounts plus any fees, and an estimate endpoint returns the exact charge before you order. Bank transfer top-ups are free and card top-ups carry fees, per its production guide. Runa is the strictest on idempotency: the order endpoint requires an X-Idempotency-Key header, and its idempotency guide says the cache lasts 30 days, errors are replayed too, and keys should be random values such as UUIDs rather than order IDs.

Reloadly

Reloadly’s pricing page describes pay-as-you-go pricing with no contracts, free platform access under $200K a year, per-product pricing visible in the dashboard, and funding by wire, ACH, credit card or crypto. Its gift card quickstart authenticates with OAuth client credentials against a sandbox, and the sample order response returns discount and fee fields per transaction, so you can record your exact cost per cashout. It also sells airtime and data top-ups.

Will a provider approve a rewards site?

None of the public terms we read ban GPT or rewards sites by name, and none promise approval:

• Tango limits use to loyalty, reward, promotional or incentive programs that it pre-approves, and bans resale.
• Tremendous reviews each account before production access and excludes crypto, gambling, money services and virtual currency businesses.
• Xoxoday Plum and Runa require business verification before production.
• Giftbit is for businesses running incentive and rewards programs, and bans illegal or fraudulent use.

Describe your program honestly as a rewards program where users earn points for offers, surveys or activity. Never market it as income, and keep your cashout rules in public terms (terms of service for rewards sites covers what to include). If you also pay users in crypto, a provider that excludes crypto businesses may see that as a problem, so ask before you apply. For a cash option alongside gift cards, see PayPal payouts for rewards sites and the cheapest crypto for payouts.

An order pattern that survives retries and fraud

A gift card is final once the user redeems it, so all of your safety has to happen before the order. This pattern works with any of the APIs above:

1. Queue, do not send inline. Deduct the points into a pending redemption row with its own ID, status, product and amount. A worker processes the queue, so you can pause payouts in one place.
2. Hold first. Release only redemptions whose earnings are past your hold period, because offer credits can be reversed after a cashout; reward hold periods shows how to set the length by account age, amount and offer type.
3. Check before you buy. Check account age, shared devices or emails, first cashouts and unusual amounts. Stopping multi-accounting and VPN abuse lists the signals. Send anything flagged to manual review.
4. Order with an idempotency key. Store the key before the first call and reuse it on every retry, so a timeout never buys a second card.
5. Record the provider’s IDs and cost. Save the order ID, amount charged and fees. Never store codes or links in plain text.
6. Reconcile daily. Match your redemptions against the provider’s order list and balance; any unmatched order needs a person to look at it.

On the earning side, preventing duplicate reward credits shows how to make postback handling idempotent too.

What a cashout really costs

Fixed minimums hurt small cash payouts most, so set a higher minimum for PayPal than for gift cards (rewards site payout methods has the math). And the fee is rarely your biggest cost: one reversed offer paid out as a gift card loses the whole amount.

How to choose a provider

1. Start with your users’ countries. Pull the catalog for your top five countries and check the brands and minimum denominations.
2. Compare published prices with quotes. Where there is no price list, ask for a written quote covering card fees, FX and platform fees.
3. Ask about your use case before you build. Describe your program and traffic sources, and get the answer in writing.
4. Check the API features you need. Idempotency, webhooks for delivery status, link delivery, cancel or freeze, and a sandbox that mirrors production.
5. Keep a second provider in mind. One closed account stops every cashout, so keep your redemption table provider-neutral.

Still planning the product? See how to start a rewards website and how to build a rewards app cover the parts that come before cashouts.

Frequently asked questions