There are various card management apps who reach out to us about promoting their product or to review its features. These apps often do things similar to Mint/PesonalCapital/YNAB, and sometimes have other features special for the miles-and-points, like tell you which card to use at which merchant and the like.
I’ve always demurred from posting about these – though they are probably useful to many people – since there are many of these app, and I really can’t review them and dissect all the features. Suffice it to say that they are out there, and it might be worth poking around and trying some out to see if they are useful to you in managing and optimizing your cards/rewards/purchases.
Feel free to discuss the options or your experiences in the comments – maybe we’ll make a list of these kinds of app at the end of this post if readers contribute the options.
Just wanted to mention one app that someone sent my way called MaxRewards which has an interesting feature that it auto-adds all cashback deals on your cards. For example, if you link your Chase login or your Bank of America login, it will add all Chase Offer or Bank Amerideals automatically. Update: did not realize, but readers report that they charge $5 for each $25 they save you with the app.
I’m waiting for comments telling me about 10 other apps that do the same, haha, but this is the first I’ve heard of an app doing such a thing, and thought it worth sharing. We have no affiliation with the company, and I haven’t personally tried out the app.
We just created a referral code for Doctor of Credit readers. Use “doc” as the referral code when you’re signing up. You’ll get $50 in fee-free savings. They expire in 3 months. If you use this code, you also won’t have to add a payment method to unlock Card Deals.
Safe to assume you work for MaxRewards?
Haha, yes. I’m the co-founder.
I’ve found MaxRewards helpful. Especially because I have a bunch of rewards cards and it can be a lot keeping track of the changing rewards rates (free feature), and way too overwhelming to keep track of and activate the 100s of merchant offers on the different cards (premium feature).
Would it be ok to post a referral code? They’ll give one month of Gold membership to the person signing up and the person referring (max 12 referral bonuses). If the “doc” referral code Anik shared is still active after all of this time though, then you should use it because it offers a better deal. At $5/month $50 would buy you 10 months of the Gold membership.
Hi! I don’t think the “doc” referral code is working anymore. I added it as who referred me (I hadn’t put in a referral code before) and it told me I got 1 free month of premium, but so far that hasn’t showed up yet in my acct. I’m following up with customer service about it.
Here is my referral code:
👋 Hey! I use MaxRewards to manage my cards, monitor my credit scores and maximize my rewards. Use my code (fg841), on signup to get 1 month of premium benefits for free 🤝 https://maxrewards.app.link/fg841
Also I’m not sure if an update to this review would be in order. The premium subscription allows you to automatically enroll in merchant offers, and they don’t take a percentage.
Be careful on this misleading headline on a TechCruch article –
“MaxRewards banks $3M to reveal best payment methods that reap the most rewards”
MaxRewards raised 3M. It does NOT sound like MaxRewards made 3M in revenue from membership fees or anything.
https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/10/maxrewards-banks-3m-to-reveal-best-payment-methods-that-reap-the-most-rewards/
You pick the monthly price from a range ($7 – $25). Different people get different levels of benefit from Card Deals, so we are trusting users to pick a fair price based on the value that they are getting.
When you subscribe on an annual plan, we’ll apply a discount. So if you have 3 months of free Gold, you’ll get a 25% discount.
If you’re already on a month-to-month, run through your credits before upgrading to annual.
Stripe does all of our pro-ration math when you upgrade from month-to-month to annual. So if you’re halfway through your month, and you’re paying $10 a month, you’ll get a $5 discount when you upgrade to annual. However, when you upgrade from a free month, Stripe sees the price paid as $0, so you don’t get a proration discount.
So if you have 3 months of credits, and you’re on month-to-month, cancel before your next billing period. Then sign up again on an annual plan. You’ll get a discount for 2 months.
You can also subscribe right now on an annual plan. Just reach out to us afterwards via Profile, Contact Us, and we’ll issue the appropriate refund.
Are you monetizing your user’s data?
No, and we don’t plan on doing so. Our primary method of monetization right now is the 20% of savings from Card Deals. We’re working towards building our own card-linked offers network, and we expect that will generate the bulk of our revenue in the future.
We were planning on building an automated reward booking service, but because of COVID, we decided to push that back to next year once (we hope) reward travel picks up.
Also, like Doctor of Credit, our credit card links are not affiliate links. We scrape the best offer publicly available and provide a direct link to sign up with the issuer. This is actually pretty useful for Amex, as they present different offers to different people.
These tools sound great but I’m primarily concerned about being shutdown for “unusual activity!”
We’ve been auto-activating deals for users for more than 6 months already, and no one has had any issues like that. Issuers make money when a deal is used, so I can’t see why they would want to dedicate resources to block this.
We also have advisors that work at top issuers. No one of them see this is as a concern.
Max rewards is a scam.
Yeah, not going to trust some random dude with my bank account access.
We’re a C-corporation backed by Techstars and Cox Enterprises. We’re supported by advisors with experiences at top issuers (Chase, Wells Fargo) and financial technology startups (Plastiq, Fair Square Financial). We are an early stage startup, but we are not some “random dude.”
Sure, is that why you’re spamming blogs to advertise your buggy app? No wonder it has such poor reviews.
I’m not advertising anything. Chuck mentioned us in his post. I had no idea he was going to do this.
I follow Doctor of Credit like millions of other people. I noticed that we were mentioned, I saw that people had questions, and I felt that as the co-founder of the company, I was in the best position to answer many of those questions.
There are A LOT of apps that act as card managers. Why doesn’t Chuck mention them? Because they are either (1) a Mint clone with some basic card management features (e.g. Birch) or (2) an app version of an Excel cheatsheet (e.g. CardPointers).
We’re the only company that’s ever built proprietary connections to aggregate everything on your credit cards: reward balances, reward activity, bills + autopay status, credit scores, transactions, offers, open dates, etc. We’re also the only service that can auto-activate bonus categories (which is a free service, btw) and card offers. We’ve been building and optimizing these connections for 2+ years (far longer than the app itself).
It’s been incredibly difficult, and we’ve had to overcome many challenges along the way. I’m very proud of where the app is today, and we’re constantly making improvements. We have some big updates coming out this month.
However, like any other software, our app is not perfect. Our users identify bugs and provide feedback everyday, and we do our best to fix issues and add functionality. If you experience specific issues, please let us know by contacting us through the app.
If we have not earned your trust, I’m sorry. We make improvements to the app everyday, so I hope one day you’ll give us a shot.
Thanks for answering people’s questions
Hello Anik,
How accurate is the offer/cash back details which you are pulling up. Are you accessing it from the banks and their network directly, or you do screen scraping in which case the date might not be accurate. Same for (auto)-activating the cash back/ offers. How do I know for sure that the offer has actually been activated at the bank – are you connected to the bank network for this?
The merchant offers are directly downloaded from the credit card companies.
I’ve found that some of the cards’ default % cash back categories are out of date (I think they were accurate when they originally added the card to their database) but it’s pretty easy to add, edit, and/or delete cash back categories to be accurate.
There definitely are bugs in the app, and I’ve reported a bunch of them to customer service, and some of them have been subsequently fixed :). But the app is still really useful to me overall.
One thing that so far isn’t very accurate is the app’s ability to judge whether any particular transaction on a credit card was in a certain % back category. So I don’t use the app for that.
But the ability to centralize all my % cash back info to know which card is best to use right now for what, the fact it activates my Discover 5% categories each quarter, and that it downloads and activates Amex, Chase, BoA, and, to a decent extent, Citi merchant offers (Citi’s tech interface has made it hard & slow for them to download and activate offers so they are downloaded and activated but it takes longer and sometimes you need to go to Citi to activate an offer), has been really useful for me. It probably downloads and activates other card’s offers too but those are the only cards I’ve had that it’s downloaded for so far. Not all cards offer merchant offers either. US Bank and Truist do offer a small number, but MaxRewards doesn’t download those yet.
They’ve also occasionally given out free months of Gold (premium) membership as “compensation” for times when there’ve been technical difficulties with the Chase or Citi connections, or as a thank you when I’ve sent in information about bugs. I think I’ve gotten 7 free months for stuff like that since I got my membership last September.
I wish the credit card companies would work more with MaxRewards to make the tech work more easily. Apparently the credit card companies will change something with their software/servers and then MaxRewards engineers will have to scramble to change their software to adjust to the update, without any info from the credit card companies. I’m not a programmer, but it does seem like some collaboration from the credit card companies could make it a lot easier! If it’s true what Anik was saying, that the credit card companies make money from the merchant offers, then maybe there could be a potential collaboration there in the future 🤔.
Whatever you say,
Anik. And yet, your app is riddled with bugs and has terrible reviews.
Yeah, I’m not going to trust some random dude.
To clarify, users must give your app full access to their credit card (and banking) accounts to get these savings?
Not that this is any different than Mint, Personal Capital, Wealthfront, or other services, but seems like a big “cost” for a potentially small — $5–15 per month.
Noticed you mention ‘bank-level security on your site — how secure are we talking? Plaid-level? More? Less?
Sure, I can explain what we do. When you add an account, we encrypt your username and password. Both are encrypted with a key unique to your account. This key is not stored on the app or in our primary database.
The app connects to a middleware layer through an encrypted connection. We use SSL-pinning to ensure only our mobile app can use our middleware. Our middleware then connects to proprietary API’s we’ve built that logs you in to your bank, pulls the relevant data, standardizes the data and then upload its to our database.
At no point is your username or password saved on the app. Our connections are as secure as Plaids’ or any banks’.
They are also more private than most banks. For example, when you log in to Wells Fargo, your Wells Fargo app sends a variety of data about your phone, like battery usage. When you log in to Wells Fargo via MaxRewards, we do not send any of these unnecessary pieces of data.
In regards to value, Card Deals is just one feature. We’re the only app that aggregates reward balances, reward activity, reward rates, bills, credit scores, etc. I personally have 8 accounts and 11 cards connected, and it’s been a huge timesaver and convenience for me.
If you have to be able to reconstruct the plain text to log in to the banks, it sounds like users’ bank username and password combinations are encrypted but couldn’t be hashed and salted the way they would be in a database like the bank’s own. I don’t see how you could avoid that, and I applaud you for keeping the keys in a separate database, but if someone compromised both databases they could extract the usernames and passwords. I’d expect users would also need to turn off two-factor authentication or potentially re-authenticate every few hours (per your FAQ).
Honestly, I don’t think that’s a huge security risk, and if you guys caught the breach and responsibly disclosed IMMEDIATELY it’s just be a couple password resets, but you might be saying “bank-level encryption” without being able to say “as secure as your bank.” Do you audit under FINRA or similar?
Yes, one-way encryption is not practical for account aggregation, as it would mean users would need to re-enter their credentials every time. Our approach is the most secure way to support account aggregation with automatic refreshes.
We, of course, have policies in place if there’s a breach, and we constantly monitor network traffic.
FINRA isn’t applicable for us, as we don’t deal with securities. We will eventually aim for SOC 2 certification, but it’s a significant expense that isn’t essential right now. We’ve had bank security experts review our protocols to ensure we are employing best-practices across the board.
no way i am paying them 20% for them just doing what i can easily do myself. also, not giving away my logins either. thanks doc
Hi Nick,
You can use the app without unlocking Card Deals. It’s an opt-in feature.
However, most users find it’s worth it because they save far more money with us auto-activating deals, presenting all deals in one place and factoring available offers in best card recommendations.
Anik, can a user unlock Card Deals for only certain cards, or is it all or nothing?
At this point, it’s for all cards. We constantly add features and functionality based on user requests, so if we hear this request often, we’ll probably add it.
Hi, I know this is an old question, but just wanted to put it out there: if you didn’t want to have a card’s offers activated, you could also add cards without linking them to your bank. So you could add a card and make sure the cash back %s are accurate, and that info would show up in the “Best Card to Use”. And you can just manually update the cash back % if it changes. And if you wanted to view and activate merchant offers you could just do that on your bank’s app or website.
That being said, if you have 2 cards at the same bank and only want to auto-activate the merchant offers on one card, there isn’t a way to opt out for one of the cards, as far as I know.
How many people do you think have to use this before automated Offers go the way of automated Price Protection?
Issuers lose money with price protection. They make money with offers. As more people use offers, it’ll just get more popular.