How we make money

WhatCard is free, and it stays free. There is no paid tier, no trial that expires, and no plan to add one.

The product earns money one way: card referral links. When you apply for a card through a link here and the issuer approves you, the issuer may pay us a referral bonus. Every link that can earn us money is marked where it appears, next to the Apply button, not buried in a footer.

What that money cannot touch

Your ranking is computed from two inputs: your spending and each card’s annual fee. The code that ranks cards does not know what any card pays us, and that is a design constraint, not a policy we hope to keep.

You can check this from the outside, in two ways:

• Cards that would lose you money are shown as negative numbers, regardless of what they would pay us. A site optimising for payout would never print a negative number.
• The cards we recommend most often are no-fee cards, which typically earn us nothing at all.

If we ever rank by payout, the negative numbers across the product are how you would catch us.

What we never sell

Your spending data. Transactions are used to categorise your spending and compute your rewards, and for nothing else. No advertisers, no data brokers. You can disconnect a bank and delete your data at any time from Settings.