About CardAff
CardAff is an independent calculator that shows the real monthly cost of virtual cards for affiliate marketing. You enter how many cards you need and how much you plan to spend — the calculator takes each service's own tariffs, adds issuing, top-up and decline fees, and ranks the services by what they will actually cost you.
The problem we solve
A media buyer choosing a card service faces a wall of numbers that are impossible to compare: one charges 3% on top-ups but nothing per card, another has a cheap card but a monthly subscription, a third looks cheapest until you count the fee for every declined transaction.
Published reviews rarely help. They compare features, not money, and the order in them usually reflects affiliate deals rather than arithmetic. The answer to the only question that matters — what will this cost me per month at my volume — is missing.
How the calculation works
Every service is put through the same four steps with your numbers, so the results are comparable:
- Issuing. Cost per card, multiplied by how many cards you need, minus volume discounts where a service has them.
- Top-ups. The commission on funding, applied to the budget you entered — this is where most of the cost usually sits.
- Fixed fees. Subscription and per-card maintenance, converted to your monthly volume.
- Declines. The share of failed transactions multiplied by the decline fee. At a 10% decline rate this line alone can outweigh a lower top-up commission.
Cashback, if the service pays it, is subtracted at the end. The result is a single monthly figure per service — and the ranking follows from it, not from our opinion.
Where the data comes from
Tariffs are collected from the services' own dashboards — the same screens their clients see after signing up. Where a service exposes an API, the figures are pulled automatically twice a day; the rest are checked manually.
Every change is logged. The changelog is open on the site, so you can see when a service raised its commission and what it was before.
How this differs from a review site
| Typical top-10 list | CardAff | |
|---|---|---|
| Order of services | Editorial choice or affiliate payout | Calculated cost for your parameters |
| Source of figures | Landing pages and press releases | The services' own dashboards |
| Decline fees | Usually not mentioned | Part of the calculation |
| Your volume | Not taken into account | Cards and budget are the input |
| Changes over time | Article silently goes stale | Public changelog with dates |
What you can do here
Who this is for
How we make money
The site is free and has no ads. Some services pay us a commission when a reader signs up through our link — those links are marked as sponsored.
This does not change the calculation. The order of services is produced by arithmetic on the tariffs you see; services that pay us nothing appear on exactly the same terms. If paying could buy a position, the calculator would be worthless — including to us.