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.

Last updated August 5, 2026 · contact@usethesecards.com

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 parked, 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 report an error. 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 — corrections, card data we got wrong, or a card you want covered. A human reads them.