RailGuard
Security
Card limits, expense reviews and in-code checks all leave gaps when an AI agent is the one spending. Here's where each tool fits — and what a dedicated governance layer adds.
| Capability | Ramp | Stripe Issuing | In-code guardrails | RailGuard |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Where it sits | Company spend management | Payment infrastructure | Inside the agent's code | Policy & audit layer between agent and payment |
| Decision before money moves | No | Card-level limits only | Only if you build it | Yes |
| Per-agent policies and budgets | Company-level controls | Per-card controls | Yes | Yes |
| Evaluates the agent's reasoning and context | No | No | No | Yes |
| Human approval queue for out-of-policy requests | General approval flows | No | No | Yes |
| Structured reason returned to the agent | No | Decline codes | No | Yes |
| Receipt reporting & approved-vs-settled checks | Receipts for expenses | No | No | Yes |
| Append-only audit trail of every decision | No | Payment logs | No | Yes |
| Vendor-neutral: works with cards, USDC or log-only | Ramp rails only | Stripe rails only | Depends on your code | Yes |
Based on the linked vendor documentation and public product pages (see sources below); a comparison of focus, not an exhaustive feature checklist. Availability varies by plan, region and configuration. RailGuard is independent of Ramp and Stripe.
A finance platform for company spend — cards, budgets and expense flows. Ramp's agent cards bring agent purchases into that program, but controls are scoped to Ramp's rails and its approval flows are built for people, not for agents that need a machine-readable decision in milliseconds.
Use it as a rail under RailGuard's policy layer.
Payment infrastructure with card-level spending controls and credentials for agentic commerce. It can cap what a card can do, but it doesn't know the agent's reasoning, route an out-of-policy request to a named approver, or keep a governance-grade audit trail of why each payment was allowed.
Use it as a rail under RailGuard's policy layer.
Budget checks inside your agent's own code. Quick to start, but they share the agent's trust domain — a prompt change or refactor can silently remove them, and there's no independent record of what was checked or why. Finance and compliance have to take the agent's word for it.
Replace with a server-side checkpoint your agent can't edit.
RailGuard isn't another place money lives — it's the checkpoint and the record around whatever rail your agents already use.
Free Developer tier: 1,000 evaluations a month, no card required. 14-day money-back guarantee on paid plans.
No. Ramp manages company spend and Stripe powers payments. RailGuard is the policy and audit layer that sits between your AI agents and whatever rail they pay with — including Stripe Issuing, Ramp cards, USDC transfers or spend your agent makes elsewhere. Most teams use RailGuard alongside these tools, not instead of them.
In-code checks are easy for an agent (or a code change) to bypass, live in the same trust domain as the agent, and leave no independent record. RailGuard evaluates every request server-side against policies you control, returns structured reasons, and writes each outcome to an append-only audit log the agent cannot edit.
Expense platforms review purchases after they happen — a receipt, a report, a reimbursement. Agent transactions need a decision before money moves: budget left, merchant allowed, under the auto-approve threshold. RailGuard makes that call in real time, pauses edge cases for a human, and keeps the trail.