When you are into “travel hacking” and credit card points and miles, keeping an overview of what card to use where and what bonuses and offers are available can get easily overwhelming. That’s where CardPointers comes in. If you are on iOS you might be already familiar with the app. CardPointers has been around quite a while for Apple devices.
This week CardPointers launched on Android. I used CardPointers before on my iPad but as you can imagine, this is quite inconvenient when you are on the go. Also, I don’t always have my iPad with me. My primary phone is an Android device and finally, I have this little helpful tool always in my pocket.
CardPointers just launched on Android earlier this week. Therefore a few features you might be used to from the iOS app are missing. The developer is working hard to improve the app and add more features in the coming days and weeks.
About CardPointers
If you are not familiar with CardPointers, it helps you to track your credit cards. Get information about your annual fee and keep track of your sign-up bonuses. Manage your credit card offers from your various cards like Uber credits with Amex, Global Entry credits, and more.
At the moment, you can’t add Amex offers, Chase offers and other Bank offers with the Android app. Right now, you can use the iOS app or the Chrome extension CardPointers X to do so. You will however need a Pro subscription to CardPointers. More about the Chrome extension later in the post.
The app also helps you to decide which credit card to use for certain spending categories like travel, groceries, and more. These are the pointers, the app will point out to you to maximize your spending and earn even more miles and points.
Credit Card Information
The big advantage of CardPointers is that you won’t add any credit card account information in the app. All you do is telling the app what kind of credit card you want to “track”, like the American Express Platinum card. You just select the card within the app and add it. You will never have to enter any personal information about the card like the credit card number. This was very important to me, as I don’t like linking credit cards all over the internet. CardPointers privacy policy can be found online as well if you want to dive deeper into that.
Pricing
In general, CardPointers is free of charge. Even in free mode, the app is very useful in tracking your credit cards. If you are really hardcore about travel hacking and maximizing your credit card spending, you can sign up for a Pro plan. It gives you many more helpful features and helps to support the developer of CardPointers.
Free Trial
If you signed up for CardPointers you can claim your free 3-day trial. You don’t have to claim it right away, you can wait, get familiar with the app first and add your cards.
Plans
CardPointers offers three plans to give you a choice what suits best for you.
- Monthly: $7.99
- Annual: $49.99
- Lifetime: $99.99 one time payment
A big advantage of CardPointers compared to other apps is its subscription. One single subscription syncs between all of your devices and operating systems when you log in with the same account. Most other apps want you to pay on Google Play Store and on the Apple App store if you want to use the app on both operating systems. Pro features are also coming to the Chrome Extension pretty soon.
CardPointers X Chrome Extension
The Chrome extension is the perfect companion for your travel hacking setup. With the Chrome extension, it gets extremely easy to add Amex offers. View all your offers across all of your cards. Sort and filter the Amex offers by value, minimum spend, category, and more. You can also add all of them in just one click rather than adding offers one by one. A huge benefit. These offers will also show up in your CardPointers app and you can track them easily on the go.
By the way, you can use this extension not only in Chrome. It should work with every browser which is based on Chromium and allows extensions like Microsoft Edge and Brave Browser.
Usage Tip
After you installed the extension in your favorite browser, in my case it was Edge, navigate to the American Express website and log in. The card pointers modal window should show up automatically. If not, click on the CardPointers X extension icon in your browser and click on “Open Amex Offers”. You might have to pin the extension in Chrome for it to work automatically, it helped for me. All of the buttons in the extension only work when you are on the Amex website. By the way, to link your Amex offers to your CardPointers account, click on login on the bottom right of the extension window and log in to the CardPointers WebApp. After that, you should see that you are logged in and your email address.
Web App
Besides being available on every major operating system, excluding Windows, there is also a WebApp you can use in the browser. This is not as convenient as the app on your mobile devices but it is another way to give you access to your information.
Conclusion
CardPointers is the perfect companion to track your credit cards and especially offers. This app is even more important when you have a lot of credit cards. You will easily lose oversight of what benefits each card offers. The app is developed by one single person, Emmanuel Crouvisier. I am so happy that it finally is available for Android. I had my doubts that it will ever come to Android.
I haven’t talked much about the iOS app here because I mainly wanted to showcase the Android app. It offers at the moment a lot more features but it also has been around for a few years now. I love the integration of the Apple Watch with CardPointers. Hopefully, the support for watches will also come on the Android ecosystem.
[Images courtesy of cardpointers.com]
Peter has a passion for Traveling, Photography, and Geocaching. These are the best ingredients for amazing adventures all over the globe. “Traveling is fun, no matter if you stay in a luxury hotel or travel like a backpacker.” Peter shares his experiences on his Blog www.gatetoadventures.com
Some of Peter’s photos are published on corporate websites, in-flight magazines, travel guides, and much more.
