Ramp vs Brex: pricing, fees and which corporate card your company qualifies for

How much does Ramp cost compared to Brex?

On list price Brex is cheaper by $3 per user a month. On the price you would actually sign, they are the same, and the reason is a discount only one of them publishes.

Ramp lists Plus at $15 per user a month and states 20 percent off with annual billing. Twenty percent off $15 is $12.00, which is Brex Premium's list price exactly. So a company willing to commit to a year pays the same per seat either way, and every comparison that leads with the $3 gap is quoting Ramp at monthly billing and Brex at list, which is not a like for like comparison. Here is a 40 person company on each option.

That leaves one real difference on the seat line, and it is the item Ramp names but never quantifies. The Plus tier is listed as $15 per user a month "plus a platform fee based on team size", and Ramp does not say what that fee is at any headcount. Brex mentions no equivalent. So on an annual commitment Brex Premium is the known quantity at $5,760 for 40 people, and Ramp Plus is $5,760 plus an amount you have to ask for. Any budget built from the $15 or the $12 alone will come in under what you pay, and on Ramp's side you cannot even bound the error from the public page.

It is worth noting how modest both of these are next to the incumbent. Expensify charges $18 per member a month on an annual Control subscription and $36 on pay per use, so the same 40 people cost $8,640 a year on Expensify's annual rate against $5,760 on either of these. Our breakdowns of what Ramp costs and what Brex costs take each platform apart on its own, and Ramp vs Expensify covers the incumbent case, including the card-linked discount that takes Control from $18 to $9.

Do Ramp and Brex charge fees for booking travel?

This is the sharpest split between them and the one most likely to change the annual total for a company that travels.

Ramp states that Ramp Travel carries zero platform fees and zero booking fees, and it states the commitment in absolute terms: no matter how many users are on the platform and no matter how many trips they book. Employees book flights and hotels in Ramp itself, with policy applied at the point of booking rather than at expense submission, and Ramp names Priceline as the supply partner behind the inventory.

Brex includes travel booking free on the Essentials tier, which its pricing page says outright. Beyond that, Brex applies a Trip Fee, and the mechanics are documented even though the amount is not. A Trip Fee is charged once per trip, and a trip is an itinerary that can hold a flight, a hotel, a car rental and other modes together. Changes made inside an existing trip do not add another fee, and adding a booking to an existing trip does not either. Every new trip created does. Brex directs questions about the amount to your customer success manager.

The per trip rather than per booking design is worth understanding before you assume the worst, because it is more generous than the per booking fees traditional agencies charge. A traveler who books a flight, a hotel and a rental car for one trip incurs one fee on Brex, not three, and if the flight moves twice the fee does not repeat. That is a materially better structure than the transaction fee model most travel management companies still run, which we work through in our guide to corporate travel booking fees.

It is still an unknown, though, and unknowns compound. A company running 200 trips a year needs the Trip Fee to be near zero for Brex to stay level with a vendor charging nothing, and at any fee above a few dollars the seat saving is gone. Model it as a range and make the vendor fill in the middle. For how this fee shape compares across the wider category, our corporate travel software pricing pillar sets out every model in use.

Which is easier to qualify for, Ramp or Brex?

Ramp, for most companies, and by a wide margin at the small end. This is the part of the comparison that gets left out entirely, and it decides the outcome more often than price does, because a platform you cannot open an account with has no price.

Ramp publishes one cash threshold and applies it uniformly: at least $25,000 in cash in any US business bank account linked to the application. You need to be a corporation, LLC or LP, with nonprofits explicitly welcome, and sole proprietors and other unregistered businesses are not accepted. You need most of your operations and corporate spending in the US, a US physical address that is not a PO box, virtual office, registered agent address or mail forwarding address, and an EIN. Ramp underwrites on business revenue and cash flow, with no personal credit check and no personal guarantee.

Brex scales its requirement to what kind of business you are, and the numbers are higher at every step.

Read down that table and the pricing comparison rearranges itself. The vendor with the cheaper published seat price sets the higher bar to get in, and it sets it in a form that a profitable but unfunded small business can fail on a technicality: a company with $30,000 in the bank and $300,000 of annual revenue clears Ramp comfortably and does not meet the Brex commercial threshold. Brex is also explicit that meeting the requirements does not guarantee approval, since it weighs business model, source of funds and spending patterns as well.

None of this makes Brex worse. Those thresholds exist because Brex extends credit against company financials, and a stricter filter is how that stays sustainable. It does mean that for a large slice of the US small business market the Ramp against Brex decision is not a decision, and finding that out three weeks into a procurement process is an expensive way to learn it. Check eligibility before you build the comparison spreadsheet.