Capital on Tap vs Pleo: expense-management cards versus a credit card with free employee cards

Two different categories

Pleo is an expense-management platform run by Pleo Financial Services UK Ltd (EMI, FRN 1020730). Its cards are prepaid e-money cards funded from your bank; an optional credit limit (£5k / £20k / £100k by plan) for eligible customers is available. You pay for it by the seat: Start £8, Build £14, Optimise £18 per user per month (Build and Optimise billed yearly, 3-user minimum). Every user gets a card, every purchase prompts for a receipt, managers approve, budgets cap spend, and the lot exports to your accounts. Pleo lists accounting integrations on its site; we have not verified which.

Capital on Tap is a business credit card. It has £0 annual fee, earns 1 point per £1, charges 0% non-sterling transaction fee, and issues unlimited free employee cards with per-card limits plus instant virtual cards. Transactions sync to Sage, Xero, QuickBooks, FreeAgent and more syncs every 12 hours. It advertises rates as low as 13.86% APR (variable) and does not publish a representative APR; your rate depends on your personal and business credit history and the Bank of England base rate. I have used it for a few years in a small agency; I have not run a team on Pleo, and the Pleo side of this page is from its pricing page, checked on 15 September 2026.

The honest framing: Pleo is what you buy when staff spending has become a control problem. Capital on Tap is what you use when staff spending is a handful of people who need a card with a limit and you would like to earn something on it.

Side by side

Per-user pricing vs a free card

Pleo’s pricing is Start £8, Build £14, Optimise £18 per user per month (Build and Optimise billed yearly, 3-user minimum). The arithmetic is simple and unforgiving: three users on the entry plan is £24 a month, £288 a year; ten users on the middle plan is £140 a month, £1,680 a year; twenty-five users on the top plan is £450 a month, £5,400 a year. Those figures buy the software, and if the software saves a finance person a day a month chasing receipts it may be cheap. But it is a cost that scales with headcount and never goes away.

Capital on Tap’s equivalent line is £0 annual fee and unlimited free employee cards. Ten cards cost nothing; twenty-five cards cost nothing. The other charges are £0 ATM fee, £0 charge for missing the minimum payment and no over-limit fee (the card is declined instead), with the full schedule on the fees page. And the card pays you: 1% cashback on everything the team spends. A team spending £10,000 a month earns roughly £1,200 a year, which happens to be close to the cost of Pleo for a mid-sized team. That is the break-even to think about: does Pleo’s workflow save you more than its fee plus the cashback you give up?

Prepaid with an optional credit limit vs a credit line

Pleo’s cards are funded from your bank: you top up a Pleo wallet and the cards spend from it. That means no interest, no statement and no personal guarantee for prepaid use, and it means someone has to keep the wallet topped up, because a card with nothing behind it declines. Pleo’s pricing page describes an optional credit limit (£5k / £20k / £100k by plan) for eligible customers, tiered by plan, for those who want a buffer; the terms of that credit are not on the pricing page and you would need to ask Pleo.

Capital on Tap is credit from the start. Every card, including employee cards, spends against the company’s limit, and the company repays the statement monthly, with no interest on purchases if you pay the statement balance in full by the due date. There is no wallet to top up. There is a personal guarantee (personal guarantee required), which the personal guarantee guide explains, and a credit limit that Capital on Tap advertises up to £250,000 but which, in my experience, started lower than expected and has been slow to increase. If the limit is tight, Preloading lets you spend beyond your limit with your own money, which is, ironically, a prepaid model of the kind Pleo runs by default. The credit limit page goes into it.

The choice is therefore between a product that is prepaid with credit as an option and one that is credit with prepaid as a workaround. Which suits you depends on whether the business wants a cash-flow buffer (credit) or wants to make sure staff can only ever spend what has been allocated (prepaid). Our guide on card vs loan vs overdraft sets out what a revolving card is and is not good for.

Non-sterling fees: 1.49% to 2% vs 0%

Pleo charges 2.00% / 1.75% / 1.49% by plan on foreign-currency card payments, depending on which plan you are on. Capital on Tap charges 0% non-sterling transaction fee. For a team whose spend is mostly UK expenses, the difference is small. For a business that pays for US software, cloud infrastructure and ad platforms, it is not: on £3,000 a month of non-sterling spend, Pleo’s entry-plan rate is about £60 a month, £720 a year, on top of the subscription. The FX fee calculator takes your own figure.

Cash is the other line. Pleo charges £5 per withdrawal on start; free on build and optimise. Capital on Tap charges £0 ATM fee but interest on cash withdrawals from the day you take them, with withdrawals limited to two withdrawals and £400 in any 24 hours. Neither product wants to be your cash card.

Rewards

Pleo’s pricing page lists no rewards on spend. Capital on Tap earns 1 point per £1, and 1 point = 1p (1,000 points = £10). Redemption is as cash (£10 minimum for cash to a bank account, paid within two business days), balance credit, gift cards, Avios, Virgin Points or Radisson Rewards. Points are earned on employee-card spend as well as the main card, so the more of the team’s spending goes through the cards, the more comes back. Each transaction is each transaction rounded down to the nearest pound, there are no points on cash withdrawals or fees, and points points expire after 24 months with no earning or redeeming.

It is fair to say that 1% is not why anyone buys expense software, and it is equally fair to say that a growing team can give up a four-figure sum a year by moving its spend off a cashback card. Put your own number into the cashback calculator before you sign a Pleo contract, and put it next to Pleo’s fee.

Receipt capture and bookkeeping

This is Pleo’s home ground. The product is designed so that the person spending photographs the receipt when the card is used, the transaction is coded there and then, a manager approves it, and the finance team exports a clean ledger. If your current process is a monthly plea for receipts and a spreadsheet, that workflow is the thing you are paying for, and for a team of ten or more it can be worth the per-seat fee on time saved alone.

Capital on Tap’s approach is lighter. Transactions from every card sync to Sage, Xero, QuickBooks, FreeAgent and more syncs every 12 hours, so the bookkeeping side sees each line automatically; matching the receipt happens in the accounting software, using whatever receipt-capture tool it has. There is 6 months of Xero free for first-time subscribers. It does not enforce a receipt at the point of purchase and it does not have an approvals workflow. For a small team with a habit of forwarding receipts, that is enough; for a large team without the habit, it is not. Our accounting sync guide describes what the feed does and does not do.

Employee cards and controls

Capital on Tap offers unlimited free employee cards with per-card limits, with limits per billing period or per transaction, plus instant virtual cards that we use to give each software subscription its own card number. Cards are issued and frozen from the portal, and every card’s spend appears in the same statement and the same accounting feed. That covers the control needs of most teams under about ten people. Our guides on employee cards and spend controls and virtual cards for subscriptions describe the setup.

Pleo issues a card per paid user, with virtual cards, and layers budgets, categories, approval rules and per-person limits on top. The per-user pricing is precisely because the value is in the per-user workflow. What Pleo adds over Capital on Tap is policy enforcement; what it costs is a monthly fee per head, the FX fee, and the cashback. For a team of three that is a poor trade. For a team of thirty with an expense policy nobody follows, it can be a good one.

Eligibility

Pleo serves companies of any size; priced per user, and as a prepaid product its onboarding does not involve a credit decision unless you ask for the optional credit limit. Capital on Tap requires a Ltd, LLP or PLC, active on Companies House, with £24,000 minimum annual turnover, no unsatisfied CCJs in the last 12 months, not in a high-risk industry, applied for by an active UK director or a shareholder with 25% or more. It is not available to sole traders. There is no minimum trading history, and the application uses a soft search on your personal credit file when you apply with a decision in around 2 minutes. The eligibility page has the detail.

Who should choose which

If you are unsure which side of the ten-person line you are on, start with the free option. Capital on Tap costs nothing to run, and if the team outgrows per-card limits and a monthly statement review, Pleo will still be there. The review is the first-hand account of the card, and the best business credit cards UK page shows where both products sit among the alternatives.