The honest story of a side project that grew up.
In early 2023, one of us got a $50 Vanilla Visa as a birthday gift. Trying to check the balance led to four shady-looking sites in a row, each demanding an email, a zip code, and a phone number before showing a number that didn't even match the issuer's. Forty minutes in, we gave up.
That weekend, the first version of this site went live. It did one thing: type in a card, see the balance. No form to fill out. No newsletter to dismiss. We posted it in a single Discord server expecting maybe three people to use it.
A week later it had done four thousand balance checks. People kept emailing thanks. So we kept working on it.
A balance checker for prepaid Visa and Mastercard gift cards. You enter your card details, we ask the issuer for the balance, you see it. That's the whole product. No account, no signup, no paywall.
We're a third-party service. We're not the card issuer, we don't load funds, and we can't replace a lost card. For those things you have to call the number on the back of the card. We say this a lot because people ask a lot.
Two ways. A small banner ad lives at the bottom of the FAQ page (you can see it if you scroll there). And a couple of card issuers pay us a flat monthly fee to handle balance lookups for their cardholders, because routing those checks through us is cheaper than running call centers.
We don't sell data, because we don't have data worth selling. We don't store your card number after the check, and we don't track who's checking what.
Three people, working remote. We've still never met in person. We probably should.
Engineering · Austin, TX
Wrote the first version. Still writes most of the code. Hates gift cards as a concept, loves the data plumbing.
Support · Lisbon, PT
Handles support and rewrote the FAQ from scratch last spring. Has personally answered around 8,000 emails since 2023.
Design · Berlin, DE
Designs the site and drew the illustrations. Will happily explain why the red on the homepage took six months to settle on.
Email works best: support.vanilliagift@gmail.com. We answer within a working day (usually faster, sometimes slower around holidays).
The company is registered in Baltimore, Maryland. The legal mailing address is at the bottom of the support page, but please don't send physical mail for support questions — it takes forever and we'll just email you back anyway.
For lost or stolen cards, please call your card issuer directly. The number is printed on the back of the card. We can't see your card or freeze it from our end.
"Vanilla Gift" in our domain name refers to standard prepaid gift cards as a category. We're an independent service and we're not affiliated with any particular card brand or issuer. If that ever changes, we'll say so on this page first.