Save Money on Groceries & Online Shopping with SaveWise (Portals, Auto-Clipped Coupons & Stackable Offers) | Hurdy Gurdy Travel Podcast
Host Justin Vacula sits down with Avneesh from SaveWise, explaining how to save money on groceries and online shopping, while also earning more points and miles. SaveWise helps you compare shopping portal rates across dozens of portals, view historical payout trends to time purchases, and set offer alerts so you never miss the best rate.
They also dive into SaveWise’s grocery coupon auto-clipping tool (app + browser extension), which supports 28 major grocery brands and 5,500+ stores, including Safeway and Acme. With one click, you can activate every available offer and stack them with store loyalty rewards.
Other features covered include discounted gift cards, the Stackable Offers Index (to find merchants where portal rewards can stack with card-linked offers like Rakuten + Amex or AA + SimplyMiles), and a prototype product search tool for finding the best store to buy specific items.
Justin and Avneesh also talk privacy and data practices, plus what’s next for SaveWise, including improved mobile usability, smarter coupon-release alerts, and future dining portal integrations for stacking restaurant rewards.
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Chapters / Timestamps
00:00 Intro: Travel with points, miles & rewards
01:22 Meet Avneesh (SaveWise) + how he got into points & miles
03:06 SaveWise 101: What it does (portals, gift cards, more)
03:52 Shopping portals explained (why they’re worth the extra click)
04:48 Best portal selection + historical rate trends
07:51 Grocery coupon auto-clipping for Safeway/Acme + 5,500+ stores
09:25 How often to clip + notifications + real savings per trip
12:19 Mobile apps roadmap: iOS now, Android coming soon
12:54 Free vs Pro: historical data, alerts, and pricing perks
14:41 Stackable Offers Index + product search prototype (advanced stacking)
16:59 Mid-roll announcements: FTU + local meetups
18:14 Privacy & data security: how SaveWise handles your info
19:39 Grocery logins + regional deal differences
20:45 What’s next: dining portals and restaurant double-dipping
22:28 Discounted gift cards: underrated savings + future integrations
23:52 Avneesh’s 2026 travel plans + points strategy (BILT, status, Hyatt)
27:04 Wrap-up + outro
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Rough Transcript:
[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.
You’re listening to the Hurdy Gurdy Travel Podcast. I’m your host, Justin Vacula, here to help you make money, save money, and travel the world at next to no cost with credit card points, miles, benefits, and loyalty programs. In today’s episode Avneesh from SaveWise, joins me to talk about saving money through their app and browser extension, activate even grocery coupons, finding deals [00:01:00] at Safeway and Acme.
Subscribe to Hurdy Gurdy Travel podcast on YouTube for daily content, including travel videos, podcast clips, and posts. Find more information including select episode transcripts at HurdyGurdyTravel.com. On with today’s episode recorded, January 19th, 2026. Welcome to the show, Avneesh. Hey Justin. Thanks for having me.
Really excited to be on the show. We met recently at Zork Fest, 2025 miles points, travel and gambling. That’s right. Super fun conference. Had a great time there. Great meeting you, Justin, and tons of other folks in the Points and Miles World. How did you get involved with Miles and Points before on the developer side for the SaveWise app?
Points and Miles are really just about travel and also about getting really good value. And the story that I like to tell is, this actually just started in childhood for me. I was really lucky as a kid that my parents took me and my brother all around the world. My [00:02:00] first flight was to India from Los Angeles as a four month old.
We actually ended up getting upgraded to first class on that flight, mostly because of some airline issues. I started really early. I traveled all throughout being a kid, and then once I got to college and got my first job, I wanted to continue to keep traveling and didn’t necessarily have the funds to be able to do it.
As someone who is very analytical, very logical and loves optimization games very rapidly, found the points and miles world, and remember signing up for my first Starwood card back in the day when that was a thing and just fell in love with the idea of hoarding these points and then spending them to get these outsized returns.
The other part of it is just getting really good value for your money. We all work really hard for our money. That was something that was also very much instilled in me by my parents. That’s just the kind of general mindset that I had to towards a lot of things. I’ve worked in tech my entire career, worked for a number of different companies, built lots of consumer products, [00:03:00] and so eventually that combined my passion and my career background.
Into a product that’s called SaveWise. Give us the elevator pitch for SaveWise. SaveWise is a platform that helps you optimize buying anything you want in whichever way you care about. For Points and Miles, fans, you all shop online SaveWise is here to help you get more credit card points and airline miles for whatever it is you’re buying.
For everyone else who’s just trying to save money we’re trying to help you pay the lowest net cost for whatever it’s you’re buying, period. This compares shopping portals as well. Yes, it does. SaveWise combines shopping portals, discounted gift cards. We’re gonna talk a little bit about groceries as well.
Over time, we are planning to integrate promo codes in other ways of saving money as well. But at the moment, shopping portals and discount gift cards are the core. And for listeners who might not know, can you explain shopping portals? Yeah, so the way I like to describe shopping portals is they’re [00:04:00] basically online directories of stores.
And as long as you start a shopping journey through a shopping portal, you are given some type of reward for starting your shopping journey at the shopping portal. Rather than whatever brand you’re shopping at, if you wanna buy some shoes at Nike, rather than going directly to nike.com, if you go to a shopping portal instead, you might earn 10% cash back or five miles per dollar or eight x credit card points per dollar.
It’s really just an extra click and you’re gonna get some sort of reward for starting your journey in a slightly different place. It’s really simple. These shopping portals are just long lists of stores that give you a little bit extra to start your journey there instead of the brand that you’re shopping at.
And how does SaveWise help you determine which shopping portal to use? When we talk about shopping portals, most people have heard of a shopping portal called Rakuten. It’s probably the most popular, most famous [00:05:00] one. But one of the insights that I had is that.
There are actually 40, 50, maybe even 60 different shopping portals. You might think that for a given store like Nike, the offer that you get on one shopping portal would be the same as all of the other shopping portals, but I realized is that’s not actually true. Every shopping portal independently determines their offers for a given store, and on top of that, those offers change every single day.
Shopping portal A might give you 10% cash back on Nike and shopping, portal B might give you 8%. You obviously wanna go with the first one, but then those offers are gonna change again tomorrow and the next day and the next day. If you are really incentivized to get the best possible deal, what you would wanna do is to go and check every single shopping portal for whichever store you care about to see which one has the best rate.
Then you would also want to track all of those offers over time to figure out what is the highest it’s ever been. If you start doing all of [00:06:00] that work, that gets very tedious very quickly when you think about the 40 plus shopping portals for all the brands that you might wanna shop at.
What SaveWise does is it tries to automate as much of that work for you as possible. Instead of you manually going and looking up the rate for a given store across 40 different shopping portals, you just enter the store that you wanna shop at. And we’ll automatically search all of those different shopping portals for you and show you the rates for all of them.
You can quickly say, okay, Rakuten is giving me the best rate today, or Top cash back is giving me the best rate today. And then with an additional click, we’re gonna show you the historical trends for every single shopping portal. And so you can say, alright, 10% sounds really good. But if you look at the historical charts, sometimes it goes up to 18%.
If those, the shoe purchases are not particularly urgent, maybe I should wait to see whether that rate’s gonna go up soon, especially if you’re getting close to Black [00:07:00] Friday or Super Bowl or Prime shopping season. SaveWise is aggregating all of this data, showing you the historical trends so that you can make the best possible purchasing decision.
Earn as many points or miles or cashback as possible when you’re making your purchases without all the manual work. Nice. Good to see, especially the historical trends, as if the past repeats, then it might pay to wait that extra few days or maybe extra week for making a purchase. Totally.
Most of these stores follow pretty clear trends you can see, okay, if it was jumping every week, maybe I should just wait till next Monday. I’ll probably go up again. Most of our users are usually able to spot pretty common patterns, no crystal ball, but we can make informed predictions. We’re working on that for this year.
The crystal ball on the way. Yeah. Yeah, that’s right. And grocery. I shop at Acme a lot, particularly buying gift cards when they bonus gift cards. We’re recording on January [00:08:00] 19th and they’re running 10 x points on zillions or zift gift cards. You can buy all you want, but converting them is another issue.
The usual workflow in the Acme app is searching gift card, clicking deals, and then clicking clipped deal. There are a few steps and unfortunately some have said I forgot to clip the coupon and I didn’t get my bonus points. SaveWise has a solution. That’s right. We talked about shopping portals.
My fiance’s mom actually came up with the idea of, I wish there was just an easy way to automatically clip all these coupons. Immediately I was like, wait a minute. I know how to do that. I can build that solution. That’s actually where the idea came from and started with just Safeway and then expanded the ability to automatically clip coupons to I think we’re at 28 major grocery brands across the country, supporting over 5,500 grocery stores.
And with SaveWise, you download the app or [00:09:00] browser extension, you navigate to your grocery store’s website. You click one button and it’ll automatically activate or clip all of your coupons. Whether it’s you wanting to save money on food or beverages or whatever, or the offers that they have around gas and fuel or gift cards, you no longer need to remember to go and manually activate or clip those coupons anymore.
One click with SaveWise and it’ll take care of it for you. And is that a recurring thing you have to log in each week, every few days as the new offers come? Or is there a way that it just keeps activating the offers? Yeah, you do have to manually go to the websites and click it. Generally speaking, doing it about once a week is right, and then just depending on which grocery store you go to, they tend to release them on different days.
One of the things that we found is that the Safeway group of grocery stores tends to do it later in the week. Other ones tend to do it at the beginning of the week. One of the things that we’re working on really soon is sending intelligent notifications of when we know there’s a new [00:10:00] batch of offers or coupons that have been released to grocery stores, we’ll start sending you reminders to go log into the website, clip the coupons, and that’d be good for the given week, but it is something you have to do manually.
But hopefully the time savings of not having to manually clip 350 coupons are well worth the hassle. Yes, you can maybe save your 50 cents on salsa and the 10% on the O organics and much more. That’s nice. What we’re hearing from our members is that they’re saving an average of like seven to $8 per grocery store trip.
Not even thinking about, oh, is there a coupon for this thing that I’m about to buy? They just show up to the register, checkout with whatever it is they purchase, and then because they’re entering their phone number all of those coupons are falling into place and an average of seven to $8 minimum per trip to the grocery store.
It’s really powerful if you’re not trying to use it, and it can get only more powerful from there. And this would stack with rewards redeeming the ACME or Safeway rewards [00:11:00] for 1200 points, $20 off of groceries. If you were to get the 20 off, then the coupons would also stack with that.
Absolutely. Yeah. It all plays within each of the grocery store’s loyalty ecosystems. It totally stacks with those. I have the first world problem of lots of grocery rewards, and with Acme, you have to get to that minimum spend of 20, and sometimes I’m thinking, I don’t really want to spend 20 today, so perhaps I’ll get extra oatmeal, but I have to get that total over 20 for the discount to come off.
And then sometimes coupons that take it below and the discount doesn’t come off, and I’ll say, oh, I’ll have to go get a can of soup or a can of green beans or something to try to get that total over 20, so that can create a fun new problem. I’m pretty sure why they stuck those aisles by the cashier with all those gum and goodies and things like that.
I guess you’re the prime candidate for those aisles? I don’t go for those overpriced tic-tacs, so I’ll just go back and get canned goods usually to take it over just a little bit, but that’s cool. Additional savings on [00:12:00] top of savings using their rewards. Absolutely. I’ve actually been working on making it a lot easier on the mobile app today.
A lot of our members have been primarily doing it through desktop, but within the next week or so, it should be exceptionally easy to do right on your phone, so you don’t even need to be chained to a laptop to do it anymore. And we’re recording January 19th, 2026. What’s the current functionality for Apple and Android?
Right now we just have an iOS app. We launched it about two and a half months ago. We’re rapidly adding a lot of functionality to the iOS app to bring it in line with what the desktop website has, and then we’re planning to launch the Android app. I would say within the next three months or so, I think it’ll go really quickly once we know exactly how the iOS app looks.
Incredibly small team. I know there’s lots of Android users out there. I promise we’re not making it late intentionally. We love Android users. Just very small team trying to build a lot right now, but I promise it’s coming. Hopefully within the next three months there’s a free version and a pro version.
What are the [00:13:00] features that you get with the free version and then what’s added if you subscribed to the pro version? Yeah, that’s a really great question. A lot of the core functionality of the product is actually free. You can compare all of the shopping portals completely for free. You can see the historical trends of every single shopping portal for every single store we support, which I think is over 50,000 at this point.
Two weeks of historical data completely for free. Things like being able to see a full year of historical trends, data, that is something that requires a pro membership.
We don’t charge for the grocery stores and then one of the most popular features that we have on SaveWise are offer alerts. You could go and manually check every day to see whether the offers on shopping portals are meeting that threshold that you’ve set in your head.
But rather than you manually remembering to visit SaveWise each day, we just make it really easy to set up an alert. We’re gonna constantly check those offers for you, and then as soon as [00:14:00] those offers hit the threshold that you set, we’ll send you an email so that you know it’s time to buy. With the Pro tier, you get unlimited alerts as well.
Then we’re continuing to build out the pro tier to add more and more features. We’re just trying to make a really good product that people love and hopefully the ones that get extra value upgrade to pro and support us.
And that’s GetSaveWise.com. And there should be an affiliate link. GetSaveWise.com/HurdyGurdy that people can use. that’s right. And we’ll have a promo code as well that you can enter for 20% off the first year of a pro membership as well. Same. HurdyGurdy is the promo code.
All right. Double HurdyGurdy it is. Any other features that listeners should know about? Something that we’ve built that our members really love is called the Stackable Offers Index. And what we do is based on all of the offer data we have across shopping portals and cardlink offers.
We go and find every single store where there’s a [00:15:00] stackable offer opportunity. That means there is at least one shopping portal and at least one card linked offer for a given store. Instead of having to manually remember every possible store where you could buy a shoe or a monitor or a kitchen gadget, instead, you can just go to this list, which is refreshed every single day, and immediately all the brands that
sell those kinds of things will jump out at you. Oh, there isn’t a stackable deal at Nike, but there is at Adidas, and I don’t really care what kind of running shoe I get. Let me shop at Adidas instead because I can stack an offer there. This stackable Offers index is extremely popular.
The most popular one is probably stacking Rakuten with Amex ’cause it’s within that membership rewards ecosystem. We have lists for American Airlines and Simply Miles. We have it for Rakuten and Citi. We have it for Rove and Amex, for example. We have a bunch of different combinations, so whichever shopping portal you [00:16:00] wanna try to stack, we probably have a list for it.
That’s one that I think everyone should know about. As far as I know, there’s no other tool like that on the market. The second feature that I think is really exciting is it actually takes this whole concept of finding places to stack offers one step further. Instead of you manually searching through this list of all the possible stackable stores, we built this prototype where you just search the item you wanna buy: monitors, shoes, kitchen supplies, whatever.
It will just go and find those stores for you. It’s still very much a prototype. It’s still working out the kinks there, but this is a direction that SaveWise is moving where no matter what it is you wanna buy, we wanna intelligently help you figure out the optimal way to buy it for whatever your goal is.
More points, more miles, lowest net cost, whatever. That’s something called product search and it’s available as a prototype also within SaveWise, on the desktop website right now.
We’ll take a short [00:17:00] break for announcements. I’ll be speaking at and helping organize frequent Traveler University Conference in Irving, Texas near DFW Airport.
Join me from May 1st through the third 2026 at the NYLO Las Colinas Hotel by Hilton for social events and educational sessions. Ticket sales are live. You can also grab an FTU annual membership for online courses, seminars, member perks, event discounts, and more.
Please use my affiliate link in the show notes for membership and conference tickets. I host monthly travel and points meetups in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania. Our next 2026 meetups are February 22nd and March 22nd. If you’re local or wanna make the trip, it’s a fun, casual way to talk point strategies.
Meet like-minded travelers and share ideas. RSVP at meetup.com/philly miles and points. I’m here recording with Avneesh from [00:18:00] SaveWise. Get SaveWise.com. You can support the show by signing up with my affiliate link. GetSaveWise.com/HurdyGurdy, we’ve talked about saving money with SaveWise. What about data?
How is the user data used and privacy of the data that people are entering and syncing with SaveWise? Yeah, it’s a great question Justin. We take security and privacy of user data seriously. We operate on a general principle that we collect and store as little data as possible to make the product work.
For example, if you wanna save a favorite store because you frequently refer to it, obviously we need to be able to save that data.
In fact, we often hear from our members that they wish we store more data to make things a little bit easier for them. All the data’s encrypted.
We follow all of the best technology practices. I’ve worked at a bunch of consumer product companies in my career. We’re not [00:19:00] backed by any venture capital firms. This is entirely a bootstrapped operation, and most importantly, we don’t have any ads on the site anywhere, so there is no incentive for us to sell any data about where you’re shopping or the kinds of deals that you’re going after.
Our site is entirely about helping you save money for things that you’re already decided to buy, not pushing additional products on you. I hope that makes listeners feel really comfortable with our general philosophy and what we’re trying to do here, it’s very much not in our best interest nor our members for us to serve ads and to sell user data, it’s just not something that we’re in it for.
How are the grocery programs linked? Is it like a portal that goes to the grocery login and then it’s just saved there? When you start on SaveWise on the mobile app, we’ll kick you out to whichever grocery store you’re shopping at, ACME, for example.
You directly will log into your grocery store and then the [00:20:00] SaveWise widget or extension will pop up. Once you click that button, it’ll start to activate the offers much in the same way you would manually, just obviously a lot faster. And how does this work with regional differences? Maybe store to store?
Has different deals, will this still work for people all throughout the United States? It should work for people all throughout the United States. A vast majority of deals are similar. However, usually a person will have a home location stored in their grocery stores loyalty account, and so it’ll populate those offers or coupons based on the user’s home location or preferred grocery store.
You mentioned Android app is on the horizon. That’s right. Yep. What are some other features that might be on the horizon? One of the features that I’m really excited about for probably later this year are dining portals.
For people who are not familiar, dining portals are basically similar to shopping portals, [00:21:00] directories of restaurants. Once you attach your credit card to the dining portal and you go and dine there and use that same card, you can earn 3, 4, 5 miles per dollar on your meals. Almost all of the major domestic airlines have dining portals, and it is an extra bonus whenever you go out to eat.
If you happen to eat at one of these restaurants, you’re earning basically free miles on the order of three to five x miles for your meal. However, there are other dining networks out there that are separate from these airline based dining portals that actually stack with airline dining portals.
One of the prototypes we’re working on right now, and I don’t think I’ve actually talked about this publicly yet, is figuring out what are the restaurants in your city? You can double dip on dining portals through the airlines, as well as other dining portals that pay out in cash or points.
If you can figure out which those [00:22:00] restaurants are, you’re now not only earning points on whatever credit card you’re using, you’re earning miles for the airline dining portal, as well as potentially cash on a separate independent portal as well. We’re in the process of prototyping that right now and trying to see is there enough coverage across major cities in the United States.
We’ll see how long that opportunity is available, but I think it could be a particularly lucrative opportunity for people who like to dine. Anything additional you’d like to add about SaveWise?
We also offer discounted gift cards. Every now and then you just may end up getting a better deal buying discounted gift cards if you’re really trying to save money.
Sometimes those are getting liquidated for 20 to 25% off. I know that maybe you’re not able to convert those to membership rewards points or BILT points, whatever currency you want, but sometimes those discounted gift card options are extremely lucrative.
I’m strictly talking about you wanna buy some shoes there’s a brand that’s got some gift cards that are on sale. We also show those [00:23:00] right on SaveWise on the same merchant page. It’s all in one merchant page, so definitely check those out as well. We have some very well vetted partners, including Card Depot, where we source our gift cards from.
Don’t Sleep on discounted gift cards. They’re wildly underrated. So if PayPal digital gifts were to be running something like 15 or 20% off Nike Adidas gift cards, there’d be something on SaveWise that would let people know that. We don’t support that particular provider yet, but we do plan to expand to a number of different discounted gift card providers.
And so eventually, yes, that will be there. We are working on integrations with card cash and raise, but we also have first party gift card sellers as well, who are selling gift cards as a discount.
Okay, cool. A lot of options for listeners. Absolutely, and that’s get GetSaveWise.com/HurdyGurdy and the promo code HurdyGurdy. Let’s talk a little bit about you. Any upcoming travels for 2026? I’m getting married [00:24:00] later this year, so I think there’s gonna be a lot of travels back to Portland where my fiance and I are getting married.
We’ll travel around that, and then my fiance and I have also have a number of weddings that we’re attending this year. Our first one is in Miami. It is absolutely freezing in New York City right now. The thought of going to Miami warm, sunny Miami is quite appealing at the moment. Yes. I just got back from Atlantis in The Bahamas, so that was nice.
Oh no. My brother was actually just there as well. You must have crossed paths. It’s so funny. Any upcoming credit cards in 2026? I’m currently trying to figure out the BILT strategy. I’ve got my spreadsheets up and I think on the BILT front I am most likely gonna go for the palladium.
I’ve already been approved. I also recorded today, January 19th, an episode with Darren about BILT. Listeners will have already heard the BILT episode probably, or if you missed it, go back in the archive. Awesome. Any SaveWise cash or SaveWise bucks that we might build into the app?[00:25:00]
I don’t foresee that in 2026, if we have some really nice pro members growth over this year, maybe there’s a version of that we can do in future years. We’re a very different type of company. We’re not backed by tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars. We are a very small team trying to build a product that is helping people save money.
Unfortunately we don’t have free money to hand out, but maybe we’ll figure that out sooner rather than later. Oh, that’s okay. It was just a slight joke about BILT Cash. Any other plans for the year related to miles and points? Any free night certificate, redemptions, bigger travels, maybe some high spend goals on credit cards?
Yeah, I’m trying to figure out which domestic airline status I wanna work towards. We have a lot of domestic travel coming up this year, so maybe there’s a chance it’s actually worth it. I’m still not totally convinced of that, but I think probably gonna go with American on that front and then have just been accumulating a lot of BILT points recently and so very [00:26:00] excited to do some Hyatt transfers in particular.
I know it’s a little bit overtalk about at this point, but the Alila Ventana and Big Sur is on my bucket list, so fingers crossed we’re able to book a reasonable price night over there with some points. Any favorite trips from 2025?
We went to Copenhagen, we went to Dublin, we went to Portugal, both Lisbon and Porto. Those are probably the highlights. At the very tail end of the year, got back from Egypt as well and got to see the pyramids and all the ruins. A lot of international travel in 2025. That was a lot of fun.
Made possible through miles and points. That’s right. And are you living in New York at the moment? You said you were at New York Meetup. That’s right. Yeah. Living in New York, in downtown Brooklyn. I’ve been in New York for about 10 years now. Maybe some other meetups. I know Rove, Carissa Rawson, moved to New York as well, so there might be some Rove meetups.
That’s right. I saw Carissa at the Rove meetup a few months ago as well. Oh yeah, there you go. Yep, that’s [00:27:00] right. Any points and miles, folks in New York, gimme a shout out. All right. Very good.
Yeah, thanks for coming on. Thanks everyone for listening and stay tuned for future episodes. For more content between shows, follow Hurdy Gurdy Travel Podcast on Facebook and x. Follow Justin Vacula on Instagram. Subscribe to Hurdy Gurdy Travel podcast on YouTube for daily content including travel videos, podcast clips, and posts.
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