Lithic
An API for issuing your own branded payment cards — physical or virtual — so a company can launch a card product without becoming a bank or building card-network infrastructure itself.
🔗 Visit Lithic
Description
Launching a branded debit or credit card used to require partnering directly with a bank and a card network and building settlement, fraud, and compliance infrastructure practically from scratch — a project that could take a well-funded team the better part of a year. Lithic is a card-issuing API that handles that infrastructure layer: it issues virtual and physical cards, processes transactions with a claimed 99.99%+ uptime, and provides fraud/risk controls, ledgering, and ACH/wire money movement, so a company building a payment product plugs into an API instead of building bank-grade rails.
It's aimed at developer teams at fintech companies, banks, and startups building payment products — the company cites over 100 high-growth brands as customers, including names like Mercury and Order.co. There's a free sandbox for testing integrations, but production pricing isn't published; like most card-issuing infrastructure, it requires a sales conversation to get an actual quote, reflecting the compliance and underwriting work involved in launching a real card program.
💬 Our review
The short version: Lithic is solid, developer-friendly infrastructure for issuing payment cards, competing most directly with Marqeta and Unit — worth evaluating if you're actually building a card product, and irrelevant if you're not, since this is deep fintech infrastructure rather than an end-user tool.
Its main selling points against Marqeta are developer experience and documentation quality, plus direct network connections that support the uptime claim; the tradeoff for anyone shopping this category is that pricing, compliance requirements, and program-management support all vary a lot by vendor and use case, and none of it is comparable without a sales conversation. The free sandbox is a genuine advantage for evaluating the API before committing to a contract, which not every competitor offers as readily. For a team that has already decided to build a card program rather than resell an existing one, Lithic is worth putting alongside Marqeta and Unit in a bake-off; for anyone earlier in that decision, the compliance and program-management overhead of card issuing generally is worth understanding before choosing a vendor at all.
💰 Pricing
📊 Global score
🤖 AI-enriched data
Aucun tarif public en production. Bac à sable (sandbox) gratuit pour les tests. Devis commercial requis pour un programme de cartes en production.
Pros
API orientée développeurs avec documentation soignée
Fiabilité revendiquée de 99,99%+ grâce à des connexions réseau directes
Émission de carte instantanée et intégration rapide
Bac à sable gratuit pour tester avant tout engagement commercial
Cons
Aucun tarif public, contact commercial obligatoire
Positionnement entreprise, disproportionné pour de petits cas d'usage
Exigences de conformité et d'intégration complexes, typiques de l'infrastructure fintech