About

About UseTheseCards

UseTheseCards is a tool one household built for itself. We hold fourteen credit cards between us, and we kept swiping the wrong one: the 5% card sat in a drawer, the $300 travel credit expired unused, the rotating category was never activated. Nothing on the market fixed that without a subscription, an account, or a bank login. So we built it, used it for months, and then opened it up. The site is in beta: the data is verified, the edges are still rough, and the report button is how they get fixed.

Last updated October 20, 2026 · contact@usethesecards.com

The story

I'm J. I live in Austin, TX, and my household holds fourteen credit cards between us.

We kept swiping the wrong one. The 5% card sat in a drawer while a 1% card paid for the groceries. A travel credit expired unused. A rotating category never got activated.

So I built a tool for our own wallet. Type a store and it names the card, with the cap, the quarter and the credits counted. We used it for months. Then I opened it to everyone.

It runs on the rules I built it on. No affiliate links. No ads. The ranking code never sees a payout, because there is none to see. Every card fact carries the date it was checked and the issuer page it came from. When something is wrong, the correction is public and dated on the news page.

Its most common answer is "add nothing." I would rather it say that than sell you a card.

What it actually does

Tells you which card to swipe. Type a store or paste a link; you get one answer in under two seconds, with the reason under it: the cap you have left, the category you picked, whether this quarter is activated.
Tracks the credits you're paying for. Use-it-or-lose-it card credits, with check-offs that reset themselves when the period does, and an annual-fee verdict that adds up what you actually used and tells you when a card is not worth keeping.
Works for a household, not a person. One short code shares the wallet, the picks and the check-offs between two phones. There is no account and no password, because there is nothing sensitive to protect: card names and checkboxes, never card numbers.
Answers "what should I add?" honestly. The recommender routes your spending across the cards you already hold before it considers a new one, which is why its most common answer is "add nothing".
Publishes the reasoning. Every card fact carries the date we verified it and the issuer page we read. Every change is a commit, and the news page is that history in public.

The principles, in plain words

We will tell you to get nothing. "Your wallet is already optimal" is a real result here, and it is styled as the win it is. A recommender paid per approval can never print that sentence. We can, and we do.
The math never sees the money. Rankings are computed from card terms only. There is no payout field in the ranking code, and there never will be. If a card that pays us $0 beats one that would pay us $250, the $0 card wins, every time.
Nobody pays us today. No affiliate links, no sponsorships, no ads, no premium tier. How we're paid says exactly this, and it will name names the day that changes.
We would rather say "we don't know". If we could not verify a signup offer, the row says "reported, not verified". If nobody has credibly valued a points currency, those cards stay out of the rankings instead of being given a made-up number. A guess that flatters us is still a guess.
Least data, by construction. No accounts, no email, no bank linking, no tracking scripts. Statement imports are parsed in your browser and never uploaded. See Privacy.
Corrections are public. Anyone can . If it checks out we change the data file, and the fix is dated. That is the entire correction process. No ticket queue, no silent edits.

Who is behind it

One person writes the code and audits the card data; the household is the first user and the harshest reviewer. This is not a startup, there are no investors, and there is no growth target. If it stops being useful to us, we will say so rather than coast on it.

Email contact@usethesecards.com with corrections, card data we got wrong, or a card you want covered. A human reads them.

Read next: Editorial policy: how a ranking is decided and how points are valued. How we're paid: the money question, answered before you ask it. Card news: what changed, when, and what it meant.