Welcome to CardWhisper

CardWhisper ranks Canadian credit cards by what each one is worth to you in dollars, given how you actually spend. There is no account, no email, and no credit check.

Why rank by dollars

A card is only good relative to a spending pattern. A travel card with a 5x dining rate is excellent if you eat out constantly and mediocre if you don't, and no amount of star ratings will tell you which case you're in.

So instead of sorting by category, we take your monthly spending, multiply it by each card's earn rates, convert the points to dollars, subtract the fees, and sort by the result. You can inspect that arithmetic on any card in the list.

The two numbers

Every card gets a first-year value and an ongoing value.

First-year value includes the welcome bonus, if you'd actually hit the minimum spend, plus any one-time credits, minus the year-one fee. Ongoing value drops the bonus and charges the full annual fee.

Keeping them apart matters. A card with a $1,200 bonus and a $699 fee can look great once and lose you money every year after, and a single blended number hides that.

The formula is: rewards + bonus + credits − annual fee − Chexy fee. Every term is shown as its own line on the card's detail page, and they add up to the total.

Points are worth what you redeem them for

By default we value points at the best redemption we have data for, including transfer partners. That is the optimistic case and it assumes you're willing to do the work.

If you're going to redeem for statement credits, switch the redemption basis to cash only and watch the rankings move. Cards that look strong on transfer-partner value tend to fall a long way. That gap is usually the most useful thing on the page.

What's missing

Some things we deliberately don't model yet, because guessing would be worse than saying nothing:

Eligibility requirements. Credit score and income minimums are only shown where we have verified issuer data, which today is almost nowhere.

Statement credits. These are valued at face value in the totals once catalogued, but coverage is still uneven across issuers, so some cards' credits are incomplete until we verify them.

Insurance detail. Most coverage is catalogued but poorly categorized, so the insurance sort is noisier than it should be.

Some apply links pay us a commission. They are not an input to the ranking, and the numbers are computed before we know whether a link exists.

Try it

Open the ranking tool, put in your real monthly spending, and look at the breakdown on the top few cards rather than just the order. The methodology page has the full technical description.