Join Justin Vacula on the Hurdy Gurdy Travel Podcast as he discusses optimizing credit card spending with guest Emmanuel Crouvisier from CardPointers.
Learn about the CardPointers app and browser tool that automatically activates card-linked offers, saving money and maximizing rewards. Emmanuel shares his journey into the world of points and miles, offers insights on the best credit card strategies, and reveals upcoming features for CardPointers.
Don’t miss these valuable tips and tricks to enhance your travel and financial life!
Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction to Low-Cost Travel with Points and Miles
00:32 Meet the Host and Today’s Guest
01:46 Emmanuel’s Journey with Points and Miles
04:53 The Birth of CardPointers
06:53 How CardPointers Works
08:22 Maximizing Savings with CardPointers
14:07 CardPointers for Debit Cards and Security
16:52 Credit Card Offers and Savings
23:36 Special Offers and Discounts
24:32 User Savings and Membership Costs
25:42 Maximizing Amex Offers with CardPointers
26:38 Navigating Bank Websites and Auto-Adding Offers
27:59 Grouping and Tracking Offers
29:04 Splitting Transactions and Merchant Data
32:09 Upcoming Features and Development Cycle
35:23 Evaluating Card Value and Renewal Reminders
40:55 Autopilot Feature for iPhone Users
42:18 Travel Plans and Credit Card Strategies
45:00 Closing Announcements and Future Events
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Rough Transcript:
Theme Song: [00:00:00] Travel at low cost with points and miles. Credit card rewards bring the smiles. Many adventures, tales to be told. Make and save money, the world will unfold.
Fight the war on happiness, pick up the gold. Hurdy Gurdy Travel Podcast breaks the mold.
Justin Vacula: You’re listening to the Hurdy Gerdy Travel Podcast. I’m your host, Justin Vekula, here to help you travel the world at next to no cost with credit card points, miles, benefits, and loyalty programs. Make money, save money, and take advantage of great deals. Thanks for joining me for today’s episode. Emmanuel with Card Pointers.
We’ll talk about ways to optimize credit card spending and automatically activate card linked [00:01:00] offers with the Card Pointers app and browser tool. Visit meetup. com slash Philly miles and points to RSVP for monthly Greater Philadelphia travel. Credit miles and points meetups I host in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania.
The next meetups are April 12th and May 17th, 2025. Find a link in the show notes. For more content between podcast episodes, Follow Hurdy Gurdy Travel Podcast on Facebook and X. Follow Justin Vukula on Instagram. Subscribe to Hurdy Gurdy Travel Podcast on YouTube, where you can become a channel member for daily content, including travel videos, podcast clips, community, and bonus videos.
Welcome to the show, Emmanuel.
Emmanuel from CardPointers: Thanks so much for having me, Justin. I’m excited to to chat with you today.
Justin Vacula: All right, and you’re here with Card Pointers, but first, you are a veteran in Miles and Points. So tell us about your Miles and Points story.
Emmanuel from CardPointers: Let’s see, growing up, we were traveling pretty frequently.
My [00:02:00] family is all French, my parents are immigrants, they came here back in the the seventies or so. And I was born in the U. S., but all of our family was still in France, so we very often traveled back and forth for the holidays and everything to see my grandparents and such. It was the good old days when there was still a smoking cabin on there, and we were always flying economy, and somehow, the the seats that we always managed to get were the ones one row in front of the smoking section, so it’s as if I was, like, an eight year old smoking cigarettes, which is really weird.
But I still got the taste for flying which I was really liking especially traveling to different countries and everything that was always really great. But I guess that we never really flew in style until there were two different occasions where lucked out and managed to fly business class.
So that really whet my appetite for that later on. After that, I just couldn’t really find any points redemption. So I had one or two credit cards and they earned points, but I never found any good redemptions. So I ended up cashing those out. When I was traveling a lot. So when I look back I really regret how many missed free flights and great [00:03:00] flights I could have had with those points, you don’t know what you don’t know at the time sometimes, but eventually I found my way to had a dinner one night with my sister and a few of her friends who were really into points and miles and they were big time turners.
They were burning through millions of points but they really made me understand that there are good point redemptions out there. So they helped me find, they just gave me some advice on how to actually redeem those flights. And then once I figured out how to not just earn, not only earn them, but also how to redeem them, that was really a game changer for me.
Then I went all in and as engineers often do really went deep into this whole world. So subscribe to every single points and miles blog that was out to run then. And just, yeah really Which at first into this, to the point where I end up developing an app and six years later it’s my full time business.
And I’m forever ingrained in this world and honestly, I couldn’t be happier. I love the opportunities that Points and Miles give me and and my family as well.
Justin Vacula: Nice. So not only very low cost travel, but also a very good quality of travel with business class flights, [00:04:00] nice hotel rooms, and more.
Emmanuel from CardPointers: Yeah, absolutely. I’m not, I love flying business in first class, but sometimes a really cheap flight just makes a lot of sense. Like I just flew a frontier flight because it was just perfect timing from the airport where I happened to be at the time. When it’s like a 40 flight, it’s really hard to pass that up.
So sometimes you just got to just do that. And I’ll use the points for another day. That’s always been my approach to so that’s the points and miles.
Justin Vacula: Yes, I’ve taken low cost flights domestically, but overseas, I’ve made a rule to always fly in style.
Emmanuel from CardPointers: Oh yeah. I think my kind of internal rule is anything over five hours or six hours.
Pretty much has to be business class unless I really, I’m not going to waste hundreds of thousands of points if it’s like a normally a 50, 000 point flight, but that aside, if it’s anything more than five hours or so yeah, I definitely want to be I want to be laying in a bed, probably sleeping a little bit, nothing like napping aboard a business class flight, that’s for sure.
Justin Vacula: Nice. So you got involved on the points and miles side and then you developed CardPointers. Tell us about [00:05:00] that.
Emmanuel from CardPointers: I was basically scratching my own itch going back to to 2019. Even earlier than that, I’d come up with a few ideas. I even had a Facebook bot, if you remember those from from way back when that would just answer the question of what card do I use to maximize my points for different types of purchases.
And so I built a proof of concepts, which I called CardPointers back in 2019. So I just passed the the six year mark two months ago. So yeah, I was developing that and the main thing I ran into was a, for myself I didn’t, I had at that point, I think five credit cards, something like that, not too many compared to today.
But even then it’s hard to keep track of the rotating categories the different spend offers the different Bonus points for the different cards. And even more so for like my parents and friends, I ended up being the point of contact for everybody. So I was getting calls and texts all the time saying, Oh, what card do I use for restaurants again?
What card do I use for gas stations this quarter? That kind of thing. So the very first version of the app just focused on solving that problem. Super simple. And I [00:06:00] still have these these core features are still available in the app. And that’s part of the free tier, cause there are two tiers in the app, but it’s that very basic question of just put into what credit cards you have, and it’ll tell you which cards you use for all these different stores.
That’s still in there and there’s a corset of users who just use that feature. But it’s evolved a ton more beyond that especially during the pandemic. That was only one year after I launched. Suddenly, the focus became more on how can I help people save money because we don’t know how long the pandemic’s going to last.
All this stuff is just very terrifying. And people probably was locked down, for a while. So you couldn’t really do anything. So I decided to, it made more sense to, instead of just helping people earn points, how do I find a way to help people actually save a lot of money with the cards they already have?
And that’s where I pivoted some part of the functionality to the apps and helping people maximize the credits on their cards and also all of the offers through through Amex, Chase and those types of banks.
Justin Vacula: Yes, you’ve invited me as an affiliate, I’ve been using Card Pointers and my favorite feature so far is that [00:07:00] when I log into my credit card accounts, I have the browser tool and it automatically activates the card linked offers.
So all those, oh, spend 50 at Giant Grocery Store, get 5 back, Amex offers, there’s one we’re recording March 17th, there’s Amex Member Week, 50 back at Lowe’s. When spending 200 or 250. And I think many people don’t look at these offers often and they miss out, but card pointers automatically activates these card linked offers.
So people can have extra money they didn’t know was really there.
Emmanuel from CardPointers: One of my most loved features for sure, it’s something I use very often myself. I personally have, what am I up to now, four or five Amex cards. So being able to take advantage of those offers, especially for member week, that’s always really big.
There’s always been some really big offers there. I mentioned the pandemic where I started developing the offer side of it. Very early on they had the really big the really great offers from Amex, which is like that 50 off, 50 plus in spend at Home Depot and [00:08:00] Best Buy, my two favorite ones. That’s literally, you just walk in, buy anything for 50 and it was free because you get the credit back on your card.
So those offers can be really valuable, but the banks purposely make it, hard to actually help you. Find them, use them, remember to use them, know which card they’re on. So those are all things that I like to try to solve and put the odds back and for the user rather than than on the banks.
Justin Vacula: Yes. A bit of the war on happiness that you can’t just check a box in the original apps or the browser and say, activate all card offers. You have to go to the card offer page, click on the individual offers and add it to the card. So card pointers is saving the time there of all the clicking and looking through offers because it’s automatically activating them.
Emmanuel from CardPointers: Yeah, exactly right. And the other thing too, that they make particularly confusing and they really don’t need to it seems to be exclusive to Amex, but they’ll only show a hundred offers at a time before you activate them. And even in other parts, like in the app and the website, there are still places where they’ll only show you a hundred offers, even if you’ve activated more than that, but it turns out when I’ve [00:09:00] run the numbers, most users actually have about 250 offers available on, on, on each other cards at one time, unless you know that there are more than that hundred, you would never know that there are some really good offers hidden behind, but beyond that first 100.
So that’s why it’s really important to always just card pointers to auto add all of your offers. You’re going to cycle through all of them, add the first hundred and then add them in groups after that. And then that’s why, that’s how you really maximize your savings with a bunch of kind of a surprise savings as a, as you use the app and the extension as you’re shopping.
Justin Vacula: Ooh, I’ve talked about an archeological dig before where you had to go through past emails and try to find things or go through statements and look at certain charges, but this is interesting. Different offers that you didn’t even know were there because you didn’t activate the other offers. So that’s an interesting feature that you can get some hidden gold.
Emmanuel from CardPointers: Yeah, definitely. That’s a good way to look at it. It really is hidden gold. And even it’s funny, like I’m still like the smile that appears on my face anytime I’m like on some random website that I’d never thought that to activate an offer for. [00:10:00] And the extension just services automatically. It’s oh, hey, you’ve got save 20 on 50 plus purchase at this site.
That happens on average, probably about once a month or so for me, like total surprise ones. And I just think to myself, I love my app. I am so happy I made this.
Justin Vacula: Yes, so you’ve made some money for yourself. So that’s pretty cool. You’ve made a business decision to use more credit. And of course, as always, to be responsible with credit and using the right cards.
Emmanuel from CardPointers: Yep, absolutely.
Justin Vacula: And what is the setup like? So someone signs up for a monthly or annual membership. And what are the next steps? How are they going to activate all these offers, add their cards? What does that look like?
Emmanuel from CardPointers: Sure there is also lifetime membership, just to throw that out there. I know a lot of people this day and age, there are more and more apps that are going subscription only.
And I do have a lifetime tier as well for folks. Some people are just allergic to subscriptions. I always like to give folks choices. So there is that is also available. But as far as how to to, to use it all yeah, so it’s [00:11:00] super simple to get started. You can use just the app, just the extension, or use both.
It’s best when you use both, but really up to you. To get started with the app it’s as simple as downloading it from the App Store or the Play Store. Then you just create an account so that you can log in on other devices as well. And then you just put in which credit cards you have.
There’s no bank logins or anything like that. I’m very big from the beginning that I started building card pointers. Huge focus on privacy and security. So that means you’re never, ever sharing your bank logins. You’re not sharing your credit card numbers. Your data’s never at risk. My approach to that is basically every server can be compromised and probably will be in time.
You hear all the time about data breaches and those kinds of things. So the way I look at it is knowing that is probably inevitable. store as little information as possible so that my users would never be at risk. So that’s how I built everything. And it makes things a lot harder on my end to build, but I sleep really well at night knowing that I’m never putting my users at risk.
So that’s always been very important to me. Yeah, so you don’t log in by providing your bank logins or anything like that. You just add your cards by name, [00:12:00] and then I’ve built this database up of thousands of cards that knows everything about them. It’s got not only the category awards, but all the little details, just about for example, like if you have checked back for some for some for some cards, those kinds of things.
That’s all automatically in there and that’s serviced in the app automatically. And then in the extension it comes with the iPhone, iPad, and Mac apps. You can just turn that on in Safari and you’ll have those features as well. You can also download it for Chrome on any desktop computer, as well as Android devices using a number of third party web browsers.
And the extension is the magic to do the card linked offers that you were just talking about that you love so much. The way that works is you log into your bank website. And the extension kicks in after you log in. So that way it’s never sharing cookies, it’s never sharing your bank logins again. It doesn’t do anything like with browser history, all that stuff is processed on device.
And then the only time it syncs anything to the server is when you actually add your offers from the bank website. And then it syncs just the information about your offers, it doesn’t sync any other information about you. As long as you use the same login for the app and the extension, [00:13:00] it’s all going to talk they’re all going to talk to each other.
And it’s going to sync all that information between the two platforms. And then you’ve got basically in the card pointers world at that point, where everything just works, it’s connected, knows everything about your cards and your offers to help you maximize your points and save money.
Justin Vacula: And this should be good for multiple devices as well, as I’ve seen it work on my desktop computer, my laptop when I’m on the go and mobile phone.
So users that have used a lot of Dell credits to get laptops and they’ve deployed the phone army for the glorious my Vegas games, they can use multiple devices and still have success.
Emmanuel from CardPointers: Yep, 100%. It’s even cross platform too. I’ve got users who switch from iPhone to Android, for instance. All the core features are the same, but then there are some differences based on the platform.
I build each app for each platform, so it’s going to always feel very native, because it’s built with native components. It’s going to be super fast, it’s going to feel right at home on any of the platforms. It’s got the added benefit of having some deep system integration that allows me to do some really cool features [00:14:00] on iOS and Android individually.
Oh yeah, all that stuff will communicate between all the different platforms no matter what you’re using.
Justin Vacula: And might this also work for debit cards in addition to credit cards? Because we know that many cashiers will want to make up rules that really don’t exist and they’ll say sometimes, oh you need to use a debit card to buy gift cards.
So can card pointers also trigger card length offers on debit cards?
Emmanuel from CardPointers: Yep that was, so on Chase, I added that in recently. And I, a lot of people don’t want to use those because they’re just not going to use debit offers. So by default it’s not going to sync those, but you just, you can just turn those on from the extension.
So in the settings, there’s a little toggle to turn on Chase debit card offers. And as soon as you do it’ll import your debit cards as well and it’ll add it’ll auto add and sync offers on your debit cards on Chase’s end and that works for a few other banks as well.
Justin Vacula: And I know Bank of America business, they have certain things to waive service charges that you need to make a certain amount of purchase, purchases each month.
So [00:15:00] perhaps they can stack that with card pointers that they’re going to be doing spend and they could use it with a debit card length offer as well.
Emmanuel from CardPointers: Yep, exactly right. Yeah. It’s a great way to do that.
Justin Vacula: Or just this week or maybe even today, Wyndham released a debit card and there might be card linked offers with that.
So we’ll see. It’s looking like a stinker so far, but there might be some card linked offers on that. But new information to me today. Reporting on March 17th.
Emmanuel from CardPointers: Hopefully we get some good surprises there. That’s for sure.
Justin Vacula: Yeah, the answer to everything is more credit cards. And there could be a resurgence of rewarding debit cards as well.
Or maybe some of the audience that are rebuilding credit and for now they just have things like the PayPal debit card, Venmo debit card, Cash App debit card. Products like that.
Emmanuel from CardPointers: And I still always feel just weird using a debit card. I just feel, because there’s less protection ultimately than like a credit card and it’s directly connected to accounts.
So I don’t know. I personally still just stick to credit cards, but I know there are still some benefits there and it makes sense [00:16:00] too from the from the bank side. Yeah, it’s interesting to see how that space evolves.
Justin Vacula: Oh yes. Our best bud Dave Ramsey said that debit cards have quote unquote the same exact protections as credit cards.
And we know of course that’s false, especially when many credit cards are visa infinite and you get trip protection and multiple other benefits.
Emmanuel from CardPointers: Yeah, exactly. I think anyone listening to the podcast is probably not a big Ramsey fan,
Justin Vacula: but, some people still defend him. They say, Oh, Dave is good for people who are in debt.
And my response is that might be the case, but it’s not like his information is novel and he could still stop bullshitting people and actually say accurate things about basic financial principles like credit scores. But unfortunately he won’t do that.
Emmanuel from CardPointers: Yeah, and also he doesn’t exactly follow all of the advice that he gives either,
Justin Vacula: And I’m never,
Emmanuel from CardPointers: I’m never a big fan of that too.
I practice what you preach is a, is a good way to go in life.
Justin Vacula: Ah, very good. Very good. We mentioned American Express. Are there other issuers that have good card linked offers?
Emmanuel from CardPointers: Yeah, so the other [00:17:00] really good one tends to be Chase. So their, Amex is the sweet spot. They have the most number.
They seem to have the most merchants integrated to Chase is Chase, Bank of America, Citi, they’re more conventional. Merchants like McDonald’s, those kinds of things. And they tend to be smaller value ones as well. More often, they’re save 3 on 15 or 20 plus total spend, that kind of thing.
And they’re all, they also tend to be a little bit trickier with the wording. One thing I built into the card pointers app and extension they’ll do things like, save 10% up to $3 back. So then you have to do like this this mental math go loves
Justin Vacula: math. .
Emmanuel from CardPointers: Yep. There you go. thing where, you know, again, the banks are just trying to just be tricky there and they’re gonna hope that you’re gonna overspend, so they’re not gonna have to maximize how much they give you back for that.
But I have a thing called Optimal Spend in the the app and the extension, so that helps. Remind users like, spend this much, no more if you really want to maximize your savings. So that’s good for that. In total support six banks right now for a card activated offers. So that’s Amex, Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, U.
S. Bank, [00:18:00] and Citi.
Justin Vacula: Yes. This week of recording March 17th, vanilla Visa gift cards are bonused at giant. So of course I was on a world tour and stopping at many, and I’ve seen those smaller offers on Chase cards. It’s. Oh, 350 cash back, five cash back. They give goofy percentages and totals. US bank will, we’ll do that a lot with some of their offers.
So we’ll have the first world problem of grocery rewards. That’ll be a nice problem to have for March and April. And if we can get an extra 5, 3 here at card pointers, that’s nice, even a smaller number, but of course we’ll get the more dramatic bonuses like we’ve mentioned with American Express, but it all adds up.
Emmanuel from CardPointers: Oh yeah, a hundred percents. I think the other big difference here too is a lot of the banks like Wells Fargo and US Bank, like they’re using a third party provider. Whereas Amex, I’m not sure if it’s entirely internal, but I think it is. They have their own team actually doing these deals with the merchants and such.
So I think that’s why they’re so much more lucrative. The other one is, the same platform that’s used across multiple [00:19:00] banks. So they tend to just not be as good more like commoditized offers.
Justin Vacula: We’re in it for the long game, so every, everything will help, even if it’s just three or five at a time.
So we’ll take what we can get as higher volume listeners who are buying lots of gift cards, prepaid cards, maybe they’re reselling certain items, they’re going to use their credit limits pretty heavily and reluctantly say things like, Oh, I guess I’m going to have to get one X or two X here because I’ve maxed out all my cards with the higher categories.
So I think that’s a cool feature of card pointers that you’ll find those unexpected cashback offers.
Emmanuel from CardPointers: Yeah. And all these things add up, right? It’s the same thing as like points multipliers. I know some folks they’re the only ever want to chase sign up bonuses. I’m at the point where I have a lot of cards and I’ve already hit my limits there.
So it’s harder and harder for me to turn through cards. Multipliers, they really add up, right? So if you get five X all the time versus one X points. Over a period of a year with normal spending, you’re talking about, probably at least two really good business class [00:20:00] flights out of it just by picking the right card out of your wallet or, tapping the right card and Apple wallet or Google pay.
So that stuff really does add up. And it’s the same thing with these little bit of savings. If you’re buying enough quantity there, then it really does add up.
Justin Vacula: Yes. We’ll be splitting tender a lot and using all these. different credit cards and doing a lot of abnormal spending and really pushing a lot of volume.
So I think the heavy users can appreciate card pointers a little bit more, but even with the regular quote unquote everyday spend, I still think there’s a good amount of value there.
Emmanuel from CardPointers: Yeah, and I love the credits too. I mean for favorite banks are definitely Amex and Chase because of, they have the best card products for me, the best travel partners for what I actually use for my redemptions and these offers as well.
And just this past weekend, we went to Five Guys, I was with with my girlfriend. We both looked at card pointers and we’re like, Oh, we’ve got the Amex Gold 10 credit at Five Guys. So we’re like we were to order it together. It’s Oh, can you split tender? Yeah, no problem. Okay, perfect.
So 10 on mine, 12 on the other one. And we’re good. So we maxed that out and get [00:21:00] back free money from Amex. So I love that stuff.
Justin Vacula: Yes. That’s my monthly cheesecake factory trip. I explain it to the server because it’s a more eccentric thing of using three different cards to make a payment. But they’re cool with it.
Oh yeah. We know people come in here with that all the time, but we’ll put that to the test at Hilton. When I bring in like my 15, 50 Hilton gift cards, we’ll see how that one goes.
Emmanuel from CardPointers: I just heard someone posted a story to their Instagram that they tagged card pointers in and they had used four different credit cards because they had four different, I think it was Hyatt credits that they had on their Amex offers through Amex offers.
And so they split that up. And so it was basically, like a nice free hotel stay as well. So that was great.
Justin Vacula: Oh nice. Yeah. I remember years ago going to Walgreens past podcast guest, Darren Remsburg. Had told me of a certain play where you would swipe 15 200 staple master cards in order to pay a bill and at the end of the transaction, there was this Indian manager that came out of nowhere.
You cannot do that. You cannot do that, [00:22:00] so there might be some limits on how many you could swipe, but I think three or five that Cheesecake Factory five guys or Hilton hotels will probably be okay.
Emmanuel from CardPointers: Yeah. And I think if you talk to them about it, like with the five guys thing, like I asked her, I was like, do people, do a lot of people actually pull out the Amherst goal to use that credit?
And she knew about it and she was like, yeah, I don’t know if she knew about the details necessarily, but she knew that people were doing it and they were using that for a specific reason, which I love to see because there’s nothing I hate more, especially developing at the card pointers app, seeing someone use the wrong credit card at checkout.
Oh, it just brings me up inside. I just want to scream no, like I can see you have another card in your wallet. Please like use at least the Sapphire get three X here, please. Come on. Don’t take a one X card. And it pains me.
Justin Vacula: Oh, you don’t want to use the Cabela’s mastercard to get 1 percent back in store credit.
Emmanuel from CardPointers: Oh my gosh. Yeah, there are so many people who do have like just really bad credit cards and it’s just, it just kills me. Even. Like when I, sometimes like I’ll just run the numbers of like how many people [00:23:00] have added like specific cards and those types of store cards. Like it’s crazy how many people like use them.
Like they, but however they do it, they managed to convince all these people to sign up for their in store credit cards or things that are in like nothing. And people still have these cards and they keep them for years and years cause there’s no fee. But it blows my mind where there are so many better products and so many better ways to do things.
So it’s nice to try to do my part to help people use better cards and maximize their savings there.
Justin Vacula: Yes, I’m all for credit card shaming here. I find myself like Gordon Ramsay sometimes in Kitchen Nightmares. What is this? What is this risotto? And what is this card you’re swiping?
All right, good. And because America loves math, what do you think might be the average that average users would report saving in a year with Card Pointers?
Emmanuel from CardPointers: Yeah, so I’ve actually run those numbers before. It’s crazy when I look back for, it’s literally millions of dollars that people have saved now over the years.
Which is nuts. I don’t remember the total number of offers now, but no, I can’t remember the number. I’m not gonna, I’m not gonna [00:24:00]
Justin Vacula: speak there, but Okay the membership, you have the monthly, the annual, and since I’m an affiliate, you offered a discount for listeners. We’re recording on March 17th, this episode will release March 31st, and April, you’re offering a special discount for members.
Emmanuel from CardPointers: Yes, that’s exactly right. Yeah, from the the, when this podcast goes live, I’m going to have a special discount at cardoporn. com slash hurdy gurdy travel, I think is the the slug. Yes. Yep. So that’ll be a 50 percent off deal for just for podcast listeners to help folks out there. So definitely encourage them to check that out.
The average user was saving about 750 at least per year. 750. Yep. 750. So if they’re current members, just based on the offers that they’ve marked as redeemed in the, that they’ve gotten through the extension and by using the app, and then it’s even more than that, but there’s no way for me to quantify how many more points people have gotten.
Just by choosing the right cards. So it’s presumably, well over a thousand dollars for on average, but I don’t have any way to get that last part. So I can only know from the credits and [00:25:00] offers that people have saved. Thanks to the thanks to card partners.
Justin Vacula: Okay. So with the discount and the affiliate link, the membership might be around 50, 60.
A year, somewhere around there. So I think it should be pretty easy to overcome the initial cost in order to get that savings and then some.
Emmanuel from CardPointers: Oh, a hundred percent. Even so yeah, with the 50 percent discount with the current pricing. So that would be a 36 per year, or you can get lifetime access for 120.
So yeah, my goal is absolutely to have the CardPointers plus features pay for themselves and then some very quickly, basically, if a user is not saving more than it costs within like the first month or two, then I’m not doing my job right, so let me know. But absolutely, they should be saving far more than it costs.
This is gonna come out after the member week, but we’re just talking about that. But one of the advantages is with the extension is you can add the same MX software across multiple cards. So for those member week deals that are really lucrative, like the Lowe’s one that you mentioned, you could make back the lifetime cost.
Just if you had three Amex cards and you were [00:26:00] able to add it to the two additional Amex cards there you go. It’s just paid for itself right there.
Justin Vacula: Oh, and that’s all automatic. So let’s walk through this. It’ll automatically activate the offers. And then you would, what, go back into the Amex app to see the offers that it’s added and you would see which cards it’s on.
Emmanuel from CardPointers: You could do it in the MX app, but it’s painful to use that to find it. Even like they’re, they released a search function on the web. I think it’s been in the app for a while, but on the web they added one and it’s buggy. It doesn’t even work on the MX website. You can search for offers you’ve added and like one time out of four, you type in an exact match and it doesn’t show it.
But if you look through the list alphabetically, you’ll find the offer. It’s amazing. That’s a quick aside. It’s amazing how buggy the bank websites are with the extension. I’m reverse engineering a lot of things that they do there to understand how to activate the offers directly, like from your browser.
And there are so many errors all the time. It’s nuts. It’s scary. They have that much information about you and they are that buggy, but yeah, it’s software is hard for everybody, which is reassuring, so yeah, you don’t necessarily have to check the Amex app. [00:27:00] Once you auto add all of your offers with the extension by logging into say, American express.
com. It’s going to automatically, if you have auto add enabled, which is the default. It’s going to go out and see every single card that you have. It’s going to then loop through all of the offers and it’s going to activate all of the offers across all eligible cards at the same time. So that’s exclusive as a CardPorners Plus member.
Yeah, the great thing about that is that you’ll multiply your savings. So all of the really good offers, you could get them 5 times, 10 times, 20 times. It really depends on what cards you have and what you’re targeted for any one time, because not every card gets every offer. But most offers are available on multiple cards.
And the only way to activate that anymore is by using this kind of solution. Otherwise you could theoretically, if you click exactly at the right, at the same time, across a bunch of different browsers you could as well, a bunch of different tabs or windows, you could do what CardPointer is doing, but realistically, like it’s almost impossible for a human to do it, but that’s where machines come in come in.
Great. So yeah, that’s one of the nice magic tricks about the extension. And [00:28:00] then you can see all of those offers right inside the CardPointer’s app. There’s a feature called grouping of offers, group offers. So if you tap the grouped button on the offers tab, it’s actually going to change the view and it’s going to show it by offer and it’s going to show every single credit card that has that offer.
So once you’ve added MX offers to multiple cards it’s a nice way to look through and brag to friends be like, Oh yeah, you got the one offer. I’ve got it on eight cards.
Justin Vacula: Ooh, potentially 400 at Lowe’s and some people might not know Lowe’s sells gift cards. So they have various sports betting casino cards.
They have the golf master cards, typically a 500 denomination with a 595 fee. So even if you’re eating the 595 activation fee, you’re still up about 44 with that Amex offer, and it probably shouldn’t be enforced, especially if, as you said, you split tender and disguise the purchase so that. It looks like you’re buying actual product and not just a 505.
95 gift card, so lots of potential there.
Emmanuel from CardPointers: Yeah, exactly. Always love to [00:29:00] throw in an overpriced candy bar at Loz so that that goes a long way.
Justin Vacula: I just go to customer service and I say, I’d like to use two separate credit cards for this transaction, please. And specify the amounts and then they’ll, I’ll tell them, could you please put 252 37 on the first card and then the rest on the other card?
Emmanuel from CardPointers: That’s a good way to do it too. I know Amex they do have a level three, I think it is for transaction data. So they can see, a bit more into like receipts and everything. So that’s why Amex is a bit more power and than some of the other networks. Ultimately, if you’re one of the users who’s doing it across like hundreds or thousands of cards, then, I think you’re going to catch a lot more attention, but if you’re like, like a normal individual doing a few credit cards, it’s probably not very, not much of a risk either way.
You’re probably fine.
Justin Vacula: I think Lowe’s is clear of that level three data, but some merchants to, to avoid would be Staples and Acme with like brand new Amex cards working toward a signup bonus. But if you’re splitting tender for about 250 or [00:30:00] 300 at Lowe’s, using different credit cards, you’re making like one or two transactions a visit, probably be good to go.
Emmanuel from CardPointers: Oh, so Lowe’s doesn’t, they don’t share level three? I didn’t know that. That’s good to know.
Justin Vacula: I don’t think so, but if you have the Visa supplier locator or other information listeners and you’d like to put that in the comments, I could be wrong, but I’d wager that they don’t share the level three data.
And I think people are just spending a lot there anyway, so it’s probably more disguised, like contractors going in spending thousands of dollars. The same thing for Sam’s Club. I think gift card spend there is pretty disguised due to the nature of the business. So yeah, use card pointers and fire away with your Amex army.
Emmanuel from CardPointers: And the other good thing is my dad’s redoing like an apartment right now and he goes to Lowe’s anyhow. So I’m like, Oh, this is going to come in handy. He’s got a few Amex cards too. So maxed that deal out on all of his cards, or sorry, activated them rather. So yeah. He’s going to use it for actual low spend too.
So it’s also a great solution, right?
Justin Vacula: Yeah. That’s a rare thing. Actual [00:31:00] spend, but sometimes it happens shout out to the mile nomics podcast Sam, I believe had mentioned in an old episode about the monastic lifestyle talking about I don’t really spend much at all. It’s mostly.
Manufactured spend or creative spend, but a good problem to have for sure. And a quick bonus for listeners. This was past podcast guest, Mark Kaczynski that told me that Lowe’s gift cards earn rewards with the Lowe’s app. And it’s looking like 1 percent back in rewards. So buying 500 in gift cards at Lowe’s will get you 5 store credit.
And I unlocked silver key status, I think with a thousand spend. So again, because America loves math, it gives you 1. 25 X on spend. So you can get some potted plants, cleaning supplies, gas containers for your gas at America’s favorite supermarket, Giant, and maybe assemble an army of cacti for the Final Fantasy fans out there, the Cactuar with a thousand needles.[00:32:00]
Emmanuel from CardPointers: That’s an awesome. I didn’t realize that there was a, there’s that nice bonus there.
Justin Vacula: It’s good to know. Ooh. So even more money for listeners, all the stacks.
Emmanuel from CardPointers: Perfect.
Justin Vacula: Good. Let’s move on to coming features. Are there new things coming to CardPointers in the near future or things that you’re working on?
Emmanuel from CardPointers: Yeah, absolutely. So like I said, it’s just past six years now since I launched CardPointers. It’s already iterated quite a bit over the years. I’ve always had, I guess one thing I didn’t even mention is it’s just me working at CardPointers. I build everything. I do all, all the marketing. I build all the assets.
When users email for support, you’re reaching me directly. And that’s actually been super, super useful for kind of shaping where the app has gone over the years. So it’s very much I’m one of the top users of the app. Strangely, not the top user. I was just talking to someone about this today.
I looked the other day, there are two users who have more app logins than I do, and it blows my mind. But hey, good on them, but that’s really cool. Yeah, so definitely [00:33:00] there’s always big things changing. So every year a kind of dev cycle is June through through September. Apple announces WWDC and a bunch of changes for iOS and iPad and Mac at early June.
And so I focused on that through September for the big new releases. So that’s always going to have like deep system integrations and then making the apps more modern, evolving as the OS changes every year. And then after that, I focus on the Android version for the next few months until that’s ready.
So that’s like my cycle. So I just released version six for Android last month, version six for iOS came out a few months prior to that. Added things like user profile support. So people with a P2, I think you’d probably run to the same thing, Justin, that most people who are into this their hobby, most people are into this hobby, their P2 is not into this hobby.
Justin Vacula: No,
Emmanuel from CardPointers: but it’s not
Justin Vacula: tolerated.
Emmanuel from CardPointers: I know. I think it’s easier to get people to, to use to use card pointers than it is to find a new partner sometimes. And I like to think that maybe I’m saving like some marriages, you never know. But there’s a multiple user profile [00:34:00] support. So you can do things like, help your P2 know which cards you use.
You can put them in there. You can help track their offers for them. A bunch of a bunch of integrations there and that’s across all of the the devices now. So that was the recent v6 launch. The next thing I’m going to focus on is a shopping portal integration. There’s a lot of things to do in that space, which I think would be really interesting.
You just talked about stacks. Of servicing, like more ways to stack your category rewards, plus the offers plus like other shopping portals. So you can like triple stack in that way. So that’s something that would be really beneficial to my users. I’ve had some requests for it. It goes back to this feedback loop I have with users.
They’ll tell me all the time, like what kinds of things they’re liking, what kind of problems they run into because I’m doing my own support. I understand people’s pain points and I want to, A, solve those problems for them. And then B, the result is fewer support emails for me. So that’s good.
So I can have more time programming and traveling and doing the stuff I really love doing. But yeah, shopping portal is the next big thing before the development cycle starts again for version seven. And then I’m trying to have to see [00:35:00] where where things lead for for what version seven is going to look like.
There are some rumors of some big UI changes on Apple’s front. There are some there’s a new beta for Android, which has some new features. I’m going to be able to dig into too and build some interesting stuff there for people onto points and miles. And I’ve got also a long list of stuff on my roadmap too that that I’ve got to work on still.
So it’s a never ending journey, but I’m happy to be on.
Justin Vacula: Good. And I received an email, your offer streak. So this is reminding people of what they’re using, what value. They’re getting out of it. Are there other features like that people can see or use to determine their value and what they’re getting out of the app?
Emmanuel from CardPointers: Yeah, definitely. So there are even more email reminders that I’m working on that are really smart. So one thing you can do already in the app. As you can see upcoming card renewals, and part of that is it’s going to show you your annual fee in the order that your cards are coming up for renewal. You can filter by just cards with with annual fees, or you can view all your cards, including the free ones.
And then it’ll show you the annual fee. It’s going to show you [00:36:00] how many credits, like how much value you’ve gotten out of the credits for that card in the past 12 months. So as you’re coming up for renewal, it’s a great way to evaluate if it makes sense to keep that card in your wallet, because you want it to be, paying you to have it ideally, right?
And a lot of cards do that. So that’s really beneficial. So that’s already possible inside of all of the apps. And I’m going to add an email system, integrate that through into an email system as well to send reminders automatically. So you don’t even have to look at the app to know your card’s coming up for renewal.
I’ve gotten, 800 out of my platinum card. It’s a keeper, this year, maybe that’ll change next year, it’s a great way to keep track of those credits and stuff and make sure that you’re getting your most out of your cards.
Justin Vacula: And this is doing some math for you. As I’m looking at mine now, I have an offer on an IHG card that it generally would not use at all for Verizon purchases.
But this says Verizon 35 percent cashback, 86 left. So you don’t have to do weird math and see how much I need to spend to max the percentage. So that’s an interesting one. If people were to buy some items from Verizon, perhaps pay their [00:37:00] phone bill. Although this says visible by Verizon, so that might be tricky.
I’m not a Verizon user, so I’m not sure. How that all qualifies. There’s one here on the world of Hyatt credit card, walmart. com 3 percent cashback. So normally I wouldn’t use my Hyatt card at walmart. com, but this can give me a reminder to do that. So some useful ones, is there some stuff like one 800 pack rat?
I have no idea what that might be. So users might skip on that, but some other offers will be very interesting, total wireless here. Quill for business. So that’s an interesting one is. You can buy Visa gift cards from them, and that might qualify for the 10 percent cash back. Or if people are looking for printer ink, that could be a useful source.
So it’s nice in the app, it’s just showing all these. different options and valuable offers that you might not otherwise consider.
Emmanuel from CardPointers: Yeah, for sure. And the other thing that, there, there are going to be offers for a bunch of merchants, that, that’s that you may not know or that you don’t think you’re going to use and that we talked about [00:38:00] before there are surprise offers.
So it’s worth adding those offers and like the way I structured it. Is you can favorite offers inside of the app and the extension. So that way you can keep track of the really valuable ones. Like the Lowe’s one that you mentioned the Quill one, two could be really interesting.
So you could favorite those to make sure that that you can see those and find those really easily because you can filter all the views by favorite offers and the app and the extension, it’s great to add all those other offers. Because there are times when you’re just going to randomly go like on this store that you didn’t think you were going to ever shop at.
And you’ll see, in the app or the extension that you do have a, a special offer on that would otherwise be a stock drawer card. That you could then just, you could pay for that through Apple wallet or something, or even just, input the credit card number, if you’ve got it, like in a password manager or something and, and get those extra savings for something that you would otherwise miss out on.
So that’s why it’s really nice to always add, auto add all of your offers and then, pick and choose the ones that you like the most to concentrate on those, but lets the app and the extension do the hard work of servicing those ones and help you save some extra money though.
Justin Vacula: [00:39:00] This is showing for me, 36 active cards.
And I don’t think I have everything linked because there are some cards that just don’t have the linked offers, especially Comenity and Synchrony. I don’t think they have anything going on. And that was my January aparama of going for cards with them, but it’s showing here American Express Gold Card, Discover It, Chase Sapphire Reserve, Capital One Venture, Chasing Cash, World of Hyatt.
Oh, even the Amazon card is in there. So that’s Synchrony, but no card linked offers, but it’s still showing the 5X. Amazon, and it’s like a little label. It’s showing me what the categories are when I click on the cards, where to spend. So pretty cool. Hilton honors. PayPal, capital one. I’m scrolling through Delta sky miles, all the American express business Platinums, and I mentioned the chase IHG card.
It’s in there, Unite Explorer. So there’s a lot of different cards that it’s supported. So it’s really nice to see.
Emmanuel from CardPointers: Yeah. Great to [00:40:00] hear. Yeah, and it’s really nice just for keeping track of, those standard credits too. So for the cards that don’t have card directed offers, but they still have, credits, there’s still a bunch of cards that have the, these default credits or rotating categories, like Discover has weird offers, but they don’t work the same way as the other banks.
Discover has the rotating fabrics categories. So that’s integrated as an offer in in the card in card pointers. And so that way you can help attract the spend there too, to make sure you maximize it, like big habit at 1, 500 and spend. So there’s a slider that you can automatically adjust.
You can tap and hold on it to add or set amounts as you use, as you spend on that card and that way it helps keep track of all that to make sure you’re not overspending and then you’re going from five X to one X on that card. It’s really useful for that too.
Justin Vacula: Yeah that’d be sad. Some of these caps are indeed out there, like the discover it.
So that’s where the splitting tender comes into play and keeping track of that spend.
Emmanuel from CardPointers: Exactly.
Justin Vacula: All right. Very good. We’re coming up to the end here. Is there anything else that you would like to add?
Emmanuel from CardPointers: It’s available only on iPhone and iPad. So sorry, Andrew used for this one, but it’s called [00:41:00] autopilot.
What’s really awesome about it is again, it’s great for P2s, but even as a primary card holder, you can just turn on autopilot and there’s lots of ways you can automatically turn that on. And what it does is it uses your location against these all on device queries locally through Apple maps.
So it doesn’t show your location anywhere. Cause lots of creepy stuff people do with location data. It all stays on device, but it uses your location to then look at what cards you have, what offers you have, and it automatically updates running your lock screen as a live activity, and it shows you exactly what cards you use as you go from store to store, the way I’ve automated it myself is I’ve set up through a personal shortcut on my iPhone.
As soon as I leave like the radius of my house, it turns on autopilot automatically on my phone, and then I’ll drive to like a gas station, go to Starbucks, go to a grocery store. And as soon as I pick my phone up, I see right away on the lock screen, what card I should be using there. I don’t have to open the app, I don’t have to ask Surrey, because there is also a Surrey integration, because I like building a lot of cool stuff.
But Autopilot is amazing for, to just automate credit card rewards and to know what cards you use every [00:42:00] single time, no matter where you are. Autopilot just does it all automatically for you. So if if you’ve been using the iPhone app and you haven’t used that yet, I definitely recommend checking it out.
I’ve got a link walking you through that right on my help center at help. cardpartners. com. But it’s the peak card partners experience for me personally. And I am hearing a lot of folks are loving it too.
Justin Vacula: Okay. Very good. And I usually ask guests, do you have any upcoming travels?
Emmanuel from CardPointers: Yeah taking a short vacation. It’s actually super cheap flights from jet blue. So i’m based in miami most of the time so miami to jamaica somehow only 4 000 points on jet blue next week So we’re just going to book a last minute vacation go out there. I haven’t taken a vacation since since Christmas.
So it’d be good to just get out for a little bit, unplugged for a few days, not particularly glamorous necessarily, but makes it just take some time off either once in a while, but it’s hard to do as a solo founder,
Justin Vacula: staying at a Hyatt Hilton property. What’s that looking like?
Emmanuel from CardPointers: Yeah oh, hi, it’s I think I’m probably gonna transfer builds I got a bunch of build points accrued from various things it’s [00:43:00] been, the build card’s been good for that.
I’ve got a lot of chase points, but I want to save those up since those are a bit more flexible for me for than the build points. I’m gonna burn through those. Yeah, it should should be good.
Justin Vacula: Any upcoming credit cards? As I mentioned, I got a lot with Synchrony. And Comenity, that’s been the recent trend.
So do you have any synchrony Comenity or any other cards coming up in the near future?
Emmanuel from CardPointers: For myself, no, no big plans there. But I’m super jealous that I’m at my parents house right now. And my dad just got one of the mailed offers today for the 250K Amex Business Platinum, which I’m super jealous of because I think I was like 150K was all I got.
But yeah, he’s got the 250K offer. Now we got to figure out how he’s going to spend 20, 000 in three months. But like I said, he’s working on redoing some apartments. It’s going to go a long way towards Lowe’s and I think it’s probably going to be too late to get the Amex software there for him since we’ve already added it, but yeah, it should be a good way to spend.
So if you give me three of them spends, that’d be a good one. And I’m sure he’s going to enjoy this insurance launches. He’s not had a platinum for a while. Having that again is going to be a, going to be a big win for him. [00:44:00]
Justin Vacula: Nice, nice. Unfortunately, he’s not in the promised land of the PA New Jersey border to buy a lot of gambling gift cards and play blackjack online.
That’s what I’ve been doing to his sign up bonuses mainly. It’s been a great run and no more floozing to the finish line with American Express as of recording March 17th. So we have to change the game as the game changes.
Emmanuel from CardPointers: It’s ever evolving, and I’m always learning stuff, too, about, cards. I already picked up a few things.
You mentioned the Lowe’s extra 1 percent had no idea about that. But that’s the great thing about this hobby, is you’re always learning. It’s like programming in that way, funny enough. You can just, you never know everything, right? So the more people you engage with, and the more podcasts you listen to, the more blogs you read.
The more you learn. So just, try to expose yourself to as much as possible absorb everything you can. You’re not going to retain everything, that stuff goes a long way and really does add up.
Justin Vacula: All right. Very good. Thanks for coming on today.
Emmanuel from CardPointers: Thanks for having me, Justin. Really a pleasure.
Justin Vacula: Thanks for listening and stay tuned for future episodes. [00:45:00] Some closing announcements, ticket sales for Zorkfest 2025, a miles points and gambling event are now live at Zorkfest. travelzork. com. I hope to see you at Zorkfest 2025 in Las Vegas from December 5th. Through December 7th, I’m also looking forward to other events in 2025 and had a successful 2024 speaking at events with award travel 101 travels, or frequent traveler, university, and both Chicago seminars events.
If you’re an event organizer and would like to have me speak at your 2025 event, please contact me visit meetup. com slash Philly. Miles and points to RSVP for monthly greater Philadelphia travel credit miles and points meetups. I host in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania The next meetups are April 12th and May 17th 2025 find a link in the show notes for more content between podcast episodes follow hurdy gurdy travel [00:46:00] podcast on Facebook and X Follow Justin Vacula on Instagram.
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Card pointers has a great app and browser tools to automatically activate credit card linked offers. From banks, including Amex, Chase, U. S. Bank, and more, to maximize your savings. The website UDIO, U D I O [00:47:00] dot com, created the podcast intro and outro music. It’s not me singing. The AI features of the website Descript helped me edit and improve audio quality.
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