Disclosure
Nobody Paid Me To Say That
Who funds this, what I get out of it, and where your numbers go.
Points Commander has no affiliate links, no referral commissions, no sponsored placements and no advertising. Nobody pays me when you open a card. I built it because I wanted it, I use it every week, and it currently makes exactly zero dollars. If that ever changes, it'll be written here before it ships.
No affiliate links. None.
This matters more than it sounds like it should. Most of the points internet is funded by card referrals, and a referral pays out somewhere between a hundred and several hundred dollars when you're approved. That money has to come from somewhere, and where it comes from is the recommendation.
It's not that those writers are lying to you. It's that a card paying $200 a referral and a card paying nothing will never get a fair hearing from the same person, no matter how honest they're trying to be. I know that because I'd be no better at it than anybody else.
So the card catalog here includes no-fee cards, cards I stopped carrying, and cards that pay nobody anything. There's no "apply now" button on this site. There's nowhere for one to go.
What I actually get out of it
A tool I use, and the practice of building it. That's the honest answer. It started as a way to stop forgetting the Amex Platinum's dining credit and turned into the thing I open when I'm planning a trip.
If it ever needs to make money to keep running, the likely shape is a paid tier for the heavy features, not advertising and not referrals. You'd hear about it here first.
Where the numbers come from
- Card credits, perks and programs are a hand-maintained catalog. When an issuer changes a credit, I change the file. No feed does it for me, which means it's as current as the last time I sat down with it.
- Transfer bonuses and sign-up offers are hand-curated too, and hold live offers only. Expired ones are deleted rather than archived on the page.
- Cents-per-point defaults are borrowed, not calculated here — they're The Points Guy's published valuations, used as a starting point and editable by you. The trip report figures are calculated here. The methodology page draws the line between the two.
- The news feed aggregates other people's work. Headlines, sources and links belong to the publishers who wrote them. That page is a reading list, not my reporting. Click through and credit them, not me.
The AI advisor, and what it does with your balances
The advisor runs on Claude, made by Anthropic. When you ask it something, your point balances, the programs you track and the cards you hold are sent to Anthropic's API as part of the question. They have to be. That's what makes the answer about you instead of being a generic article.
Two things follow from that, and you should know both. Your balances leave this server when you use the advisor. And the advisor can be wrong, because it's a language model reasoning about award charts, not a live availability feed. Check anything before you move points.
Everything else stays here. There are no bank connections and no account linking anywhere in this app. You type your balances in by hand, which is slower and which is also why nobody has your banking credentials.
When I get it wrong
I will. The catalog goes stale, an issuer quietly changes a credit, a CPP figure stops reflecting reality. When it's wrong, it gets fixed and the page says when it was last checked.
Corrections don't get buried. If a number on a trip report changes, the report says what changed. Tell me what's broken and it gets fixed.
Last reviewed September 2026.