I’ve been playing around with a new tool called Savewise (www.getsavewise.com) and I have been really impressed. If you’re an extreme stacker who would love the ability to compare all the major shopping portals and see whether there are card-linked offers available without leaving the site you’re browsing, then GetSavewise is worth a look.
Savewise Overview
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Savewise is a tool for comparing shopping portals and identifying stacking opportunities with card-linked offers. Even the version that you can access without creating a (free) account is a reasonably useful alternative to my longtime favorite portal comparison tool, Cashbackmonitor.
But you will definitely want to at least make a free account to get far more value out of the tool with full access to compare portal rates, identify stackable Amex and Chase offers, or even search for products to compare stacks across stores. You can also choose between viewing a list of “publicly discovered” card linked offers or you can connect with your own logins to see which offers you have on your own cards.
If you install the Chrome extension, it gets more useful yet, automatically identifying when you’re on a shopping website and showing you shopping portal offers as well telling you whether there are card-linked offers available for the store you’re visiting.
One thing that really stands out about Savewise is that they have some portals that I haven’t seen covered elsewhere, like the British Airways shopping portal. More notably, Savewise lists both Capital One Shopping (the public shopping portal) and Capital One Offers, which are shopping portal-like offers found within one’s Capital One Credit Card login. I noticed some instances where there was a slight discrepancy between the Capital One Offers rates shown by Savewise vs what we saw in our Capital One accounts, but it was often spot on.
Savewise tiers (Basic, Pro-monthly, Pro-lifetime)
Savewise offers one free and two paid tiers:
- Basic (free): Get access to most current (at the time of writing) Savewise features.
- Pro (monthly, $5 per month / $59 per year): Adds longer offer history, ability to auto-sync offers, ability to set custom point valuations, ability to set alerts
- Pro (lifetime, $99): all of the above plus lifetime access to all pro features
- You can check out the paid tiers here ⓘ Disclosure Frequent Miler may earn a commission if you click through from this link and make a purchase.
- Note: Frequent Miler has an affiliate relationship with Savewise. We will earn a commission if you click through our link and sign up for the paid version of the tool.
Many users will likely be happy with the free version of the tool, but I’ve been enjoying some of the advanced features as well.
Discount for Frequent Miler readers
Frequent Miler readers can save 20% off the first 3 months of a monthly Pro subscription or 20% off the first year of an annual subscription with code FREQUENTMILER20. You can sign up here ⓘ Disclosure Frequent Miler may earn a commission if you click through from this link and make a purchase.
How Savewise works
There are two main ways to use Savewise:
- Searching offers at GetSavewise.com
- Installing the Savewise Chrome extension.
I’ll give a brief overview of using the desktop site, but after playing with the tool for a while, I think it really stands out as a chrome extension.
Savewise Desktop / Website
Once creating an account at getsavewise.com, you can simply search a store form the main dashboard tool and you’ll be taken to a page comparing shopping portal rates for that store (as seen on the left side below) and any card-linked offers available for that store (shown on the right below). Note that the default view of the shopping portal table is “Comfortable”, but in the screen shot below I have the slider just above the portal rates toggled to “Compact”, which I ironically find to be more comfortable.
You’ll note above that the card-linked offer slider to the top-right of that screen shot is toggled to “My Offers”. You’ll need to install the extension for Savewise to be able to display your offers (more on that in a minute). Without the extension installed, you can see publicly-discovered offers as seen here:
By default, Savewise sorts the value of portal rewards based on Frequent Miler’s Reasonable Redemption Values, though with a pro subscription you can customize your valuations.
The free version of the tool includes a 14-day rate history for each portal individually (Rakuten 14-day history for Dell shown below).
The Pro version gives you access to 270 days worth of data.
Some folks will find this more useful than Cashbackmonitor for seeing a specific (individual) portal’s rate history for a specific store. Personally, I prefer Cashbackmonitor for rate history because I can see the best rate across all shopping portals and a longer time window (15 months). That longer time window is particularly useful around the holiday shopping period because it means that in early November, I can check and see which portals have historically had increased rates over Black Friday/Cyber Monday and the rest of the holiday shopping period. The shorter time window offered by Savewise rate history would miss that.
Through the “Top offers” drop down, you can see the top cashback offers and top miles offers as you might expect.
However, frequent shoppers will likely really appreciate the ability to browse top stackable offers between Rakuten and Amex or Chase, with the tool listing at an easy glance the Rakuten offer, card-linked offer, and expiration date.
Savewise also offers a product search that’s still in prototype but shows some real promise as it could provide a great way to find a product at a store you may not have considered that could have a great stacking opportunity. For instance, although the price isn’t attractive enough in this instance, I was surprised to learn that Zappos (which I think of as a shoe store) carries Tumi bags. I can certainly imagine identifying great stacking opportunities this way.
Chrome extension
I tend to be hesitant to install browser extensions mostly for the fear of those extensions “stealing” a click from a shopping portal (and subsequently invalidating the rewards I intended to earn for my purchase) and because I tend to prefer less tracking as opposed to more. I initially installed the Savewise app in an additional Chrome profile to avoid letting it track more of my browser usage than I’d like, but after getting used to the extension, I feel pretty tempted to toss it in a browser instance that I use more often and I intend to install it in “Player 2’s” browser.
Here’s why: the extension monitors the sites you browse and when you land on a site that has shopping portal offers and/or card-linked offers, the extension pops right up to let you know.
I really like the combination of knowing that there are portal rewards and card-linked offers. I can’t count the number of times my wife has asked me whether one site or another has any card-linked offers available and then I usually have to dig through stuff to answer the question. I love that Savewise could pop up right in her browser. Furthermore, you can easily expand the portal information to see a number of portals and best rates for quick and easy comparison without even leaving the site you’re shopping.
The extension is set to display whether the site you are visiting has portal rewards, card-linked offers, or both. In my tests, it worked automatically with an impressive number of websites. For instance, I prefer to buy my eyeglasses from Kits.com, which I find is much less well-known than other online glasses stores, yet Savewise popped up a moment after landing on the Kits home page to let me know that I could get 2% back via a portal.
That’s really convenient. I love the convenience especially for my Player 2, who sometimes forgets to check for portal rewards before placing a purchase. I find the interface here really slick and easy to compare portals and then to click through to the portal you want to use.
I noted above that it is possible to sync your own Amex Offers and Chase Offers to Savewise. When I logged in to an Amex account in the browser with Savewise installed, I was prompted to sync up my offers. I did that in my test instance and then the website was able to show which offers I had on my own cards. I found it especially useful that it shows which cards have a specific offer so that I would know to skip straight to my Schwab Platinum card or Business Green Rewards card rather than hunting through all of my cards for a particular offer.
I didn’t sync up my Chase Offers yet, so I appreciated being able to view all publicly-discovered offers so that I could also monitor whether I might have other options to check.
Speaking of additional options, I understand that Savewise is going to be adding more to expand beyond Amex Offers and Chase Offers, which I think will make the tool even better.
I should note that I did run into a couple of instances (over dozens and dozens of store tests) where the Savewise extension didn’t immediately find portal or card-linked offers despite those offers showing up when searching the merchant through getsavewise.com. When I contacted support, they told me that when this happens it is typically a quick fix on their end to get those stores to display in the future, so reach out and let them know if and when you’re on a store and the extension only shows this instead of portal rates and card-linked offers.
Bottom line
Savewise is a tool that’s been on my radar for a while. I finally got a chance to dedicate some time to using it and I’m loving it so far. I’ve long been a Cashbackmonitor user, but Savewise seems to kick things up a notch with the browser extension and easy integration with a couple of the most popular card-linked offer platforms. If Savewise is able to expand upon its card-linked offer base, I could see this being my go-to tool for shopping that would save me time and effort in identifying the best combinations for savings.
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I was all excited to subscribe to the lifetime version but the promo code does not work for that, what a huge disappointment! I hope it’s just a mistake and that they’ll activate it soon, then I’ll gladly pay for it.
A small point, but maybe useful for any who use Edge instead of Chrome as their default browser: the Savewise extension will also install on Edge.
Looks like a good site and thanks for the article. Too bad the promo doesn’t apply to the Lifetime membership or i would have signed up.
I agree with this. I have Cardpointers Lifetime pro but have been contemplating getting Savewise pro because it combines cashbackmonitor and Cardpointers, essentially (I only use Chase, AmEx, and Cap1). If the FM team can negotiate a discount on the Lifetime membership, I’m in.
How does this compare to CardPointers that was recently promoted?
My understanding is:
1) CardPointers supports more than just Amex and Chase.
2) Cardpointers can also show you which card to use at a brick and mortar/physical store
3) Cardpointers actually adds the offers for Amex onto the cards. I don’t think Savewise does that, but rather just tells you what the offers are. You’d still have ot remember to login to Amex website, scroll through the tedious list and add the offer to the card(s), if you weren’t using Cardpointers.
Savewise does also add the offers if you want — it appears to work the same as Cardpointers in that regard. I prefer not to use that functionality, but it’s there.
I think the key difference with Savewise is that Cardpointers doesn’t offer any sort of portal info, so you need to use Cardpoints and a tool like Cashbackmonitor if you’re looking to stack and/or just want the functionality of both. Savewise combines the two ideas and puts them in a Chrome extension that can automatically pop up and let you know about both card-linked offers and the best portal rates without having to leave the site where you’re shopping.
I haven’t used Cardpointers as much because I’m not using the auto-add feature, but that’s my understanding of the difference based on the bit that I’ve used Cardpointers.
Oh, and of course what you said about Cardpointers having more types of card-linked offers — Cardpointers offers access to a broader set of card-linked offers. I get the sense that Savewise will get there, but Cardpointers is definitely leading the way in that department.
I’ve been using CardPointers to track card linked offers, and they have the same ability with a Chrome extension to alert you to both offers and spend multipliers for the cards you hold based on the site you’re visiting. What they don’t currently offer is the portal info, and I would highly value having all of those things together. CP currently supports card linked offers at Amex, Chase, BofA, US Bank, and Citi (the latter with varying degrees of effectiveness), and having those extra offers makes me want to stick with them for now.
I will switch from cashbackmonitor to Savewise for portals, but here’s hoping either SW or CP becomes the killer app that has everything.
To keep things simple, I only use a few portals. I am not going to use the best of 60-odd portals out there. As such, the ability to view history of specific portals is very useful. CBM’s lack of such a feature is a major shortcoming. I agree that the shorter window on this new tool is not as good but hopefully this extends.
The other major shortfall of CBM is “up to.” A portal might have 2x on beauty products and 10x on everything else. An alert set at (say) 8x will not trigger. And, if another portal is 6x across the board, it will be identified as the best — the 10x will be ignored.
I think you’ll likely run into that last shortfall with any good comparison tool. Your example of 2x on beauty products and 10x on everything else is less common than 10x on beauty products and 2x on everything else — and in those instances, I personally think it is misleading if the 10x rate gets listed as “best” when another site offers 6x across the board. There isn’t a perfect solution either way, but I know that (for example) if I set an alert for Hotels.com, I don’t want to be alerted when Hotels.com is offering 15x in Orlando and Los Angeles (which I’ve seen them do before!), but I do want to know when they are offering 10x across the board. Of course, I understand that on the flip side you want to know when it’s 10x on everything but beauty products. That makes those stores with multiple rates complicated to display in a one-size-fits-all manner.
I submitted feedback to CBM asking to be able to select a specific portal for history. No response. But, it seems many would benefit.