The method, line by line
Every figure on Well Dealt comes from one engine and one file of card data. This page shows how both work, and who keeps them.
The data today
What one number counts
Each card gets a year-one figure: what it earns on your spending for twelve months, plus its welcome bonus if your spending reaches it, plus the credits you would really use, minus the annual fee. The figure for every year after is the same sum without the bonus. Every line is printed, so the receipt is the computation.
Caps
Spending past a card’s cap earns its base rate. The Costco Anywhere Visa by Citi pays 4x on gas up to $7,000 a year; past that, 1x. No dollar earns twice.
Points
A point is worth what you can redeem it for at the door you came in by: cash or a statement credit on cash back, the issuer’s own travel rate on travel. A transfer partner’s best case never enters a figure.
Welcome bonuses
A bonus counts only when your spending reaches its minimum inside the offer window, and then in full, because that is how the issuer pays it. Below the bar it shows on the receipt at $0, with the amount it needed. A points bonus is priced at the same rate as the card’s other points, rounded down.
Credits
A credit counts at what a normal person actually uses, which can be the full amount, and at nothing if you tell us you would not use it. Both numbers are on every card page.
- American Express GoldDining credits: $240 face value, counted at $120. Resy credit: $100 face value, counted at $50.
- American Express Blue Cash PreferredDisney streaming credit: $120 face value, counted at $60.
- Capital One Venture XAnnual travel credit: $300 face value, counted at $300. Anniversary miles: $100 face value, counted at $100.
Rotating and chosen categories
Quarterly categories are valued one quarter at a time against the issuer’s published calendar, and only where a quarter matches something you told us you spend on. A quarter of store-specific categories earns the base rate in our math. A category you pick is picked for you at the one that pays you most, and named.
0% transfers
The transfer fee is added to the balance, the months to clear it at your payment are counted, and the interest avoided is what your current rate would charge over those months on a shrinking balance. A card whose window ends before the balance does ranks below every card that clears it.
Building credit
This door ranks on judgment: what a card costs, the deposit, the credit check and whether there is a set way to an unsecured card. The reason for each card’s place is printed on its page.
Where every number comes from
Each card’s terms are read by hand from the issuer’s own page, linked below with the date we last did it.
A script re-reads those pages every morning. It holds each issuer to the figures we publish, one at a time, and asks whether each is still printed there. When one is gone, a person re-reads the page before anything on the site changes. A page that will not load is recorded as unread, never as unchanged, and a card page only says it was checked when the check was clean and recent.
5 cards sit out of the best-of and comparison pages: their offers vary by applicant, depend on how you pay, or carry a figure we have not confirmed, so we leave them out of rankings until we can pin one number. Each one’s own page says which applies.
Every card below was last verified October 2, 2026.
How the site is paid
No card on this site pays us today. If that ever changes, the card’s own page will say so. Rankings are pure math, never sold. The full picture is in our Advertiser Disclosure.
What it never does
Cards are ordered by what they are worth to you. Whether a card pays us has zero weight. Fee-trap cards built to profit from people rebuilding credit are left off the site entirely.
Corrections
A number we got wrong, or a card we should check: email eli@welldealt.com. A real person reads it.