Reads your real spending, not a questionnaire
Which credit card should I use?
WhatCard connects to your bank, reads twelve months of spending, and answers that per category — in dollars, net of every annual fee. Including when the honest answer is “none of the ones you’re being sold.”
- Read-only bank access
- No credit check
- Free, always
- DiningSapphire Preferred3×
- GroceriesBlue Cash Everyday3%
- TravelSapphire Preferred2×
- Everything elseDouble Cash2%
of your actual transactions, categorised automatically
hand-verified, re-checked monthly, every fee and cap included
each with its own best card, not one blanket answer
paid for by referral links, which never touch your ranking — how that works
THE PART NOBODY ELSE DOES
It will tell you a card isn’t worth it.
Comparison sites earn a referral fee when you’re approved, and their rankings tend to reflect it. We earn referral fees too — we’d rather say so than pretend. The difference is where the money sits: your ranking is computed from your spending and the annual fee, before anything knows whether a card pays us. A site optimising for payout would never print a negative number.
True — if every dollar you spend went on that one card and you owned nothing else.
The $325 fee is more than the extra rewards you’d earn on top of the cards you already carry. Skip it.
Same card, same spending, two different questions. Everyone else answers the first one because it produces bigger numbers. We answer the second because it’s the one you actually face.
How it works
Connect your bank
Read-only, through Teller — the same kind of connection your budgeting app uses. We never see your login, and we can’t move money.
Tell us what’s in your wallet
Pick your cards from the catalog so we know your real multipliers. Two taps each. This is what lets us compute gains rather than guesses.
Get a per-category answer
Which card for dining, which for groceries, what you’re leaving on the table, and whether any new card would actually beat what you hold.
Best credit card by category
Generic rankings, if you want to read before you connect anything. Every one of these becomes a personalised answer once we can see what you actually spend.
Best card for restaurants and takeout
Four cards pay 3–4× here. Which one wins depends on whether you also spend on groceries.
Best card for supermarkets
The 6% card caps at $6,000 a year. Above that, a flat 2% quietly does better.
Best card for flights and hotels
Most headline travel rates only apply through the issuer’s own booking portal. We price both.
Best card for gas and commuting
A category where a no-fee card usually beats a premium one outright.
Best card for subscriptions
Small spend, but it’s the same amount every month, which makes it easy to optimise once.
Best flat-rate card
For most people this is the highest-value card in the wallet, and it’s never the one advertised.
Is your card actually worth its fee?
The most-searched question about premium cards, answered with arithmetic instead of enthusiasm. Each page shows the spend level where the fee breaks even.
Questions
The ones people ask before connecting a bank account to anything.
Is it safe to connect my bank account?
The connection is read-only and handled by Teller, a regulated bank-data provider. Your bank credentials are entered on your bank’s own screen and never reach us. We can read transactions and balances; we cannot initiate a payment or transfer, and there is no mechanism in the product that could.
Will this affect my credit score?
No. WhatCard reads your spending, not your credit file — there is no hard or soft pull anywhere in the product. Applying for a card you find here is a separate decision you make on the issuer’s site, and that application follows the issuer’s normal process.
How does WhatCard make money?
It’s free, and it stays free — there’s no paid tier coming. When you apply for a card through a link here we may earn a referral bonus from the issuer, and every such link is marked. What that money can’t do is move your ranking: recommendations are computed from your spending and the card’s annual fee, cards that would lose you money are shown as losses regardless of what they’d pay us, and the cards we recommend most often are no-fee ones that earn us nothing at all. If we ever rank by payout, the negative numbers on this page are how you’d catch us.
Do you sell my spending data?
No, and we don’t share it with advertisers or data brokers. Transactions are used to categorise your spending and compute your rewards, and for nothing else. You can disconnect a bank and delete your data at any time from Settings.
What if I only have one card, or none?
That’s the easiest case to help with. With one card we can show you exactly which categories it’s losing on; with none, we show what your spending pattern is worth and which starter card captures most of it without an annual fee.
How is this different from a points blog?
A blog ranks cards for an average person who doesn’t exist. WhatCard ranks them against your $7,344 of dining and your $5,976 of groceries, subtracts the fee, and tells you the difference in dollars — including when the difference is negative.
Find out what you’re leaving on the table.
Connect a bank, add your cards, get the answer in about two minutes. No credit check, no card required, no paid tier waiting for you later.