cwasley/earnrate

I wanted a ghost card: one card that always charges the best of my cards. The card networks won't allow one, so I built the next best thing.
earnrate is the best-card decision layer for people and AI agents. Give it a merchant, and it tells you which credit card earns the most there, from your own cards or from every card it knows, and why. Save your cards and it tracks your caps and chosen categories. It's valuation-aware and transparent about its assumptions. It never sees a card number.
Runs on your machine, in your browser at earnrate.dev (which you can add to your phone's Home Screen and use offline), or in Claude as a connector at https://mcp.earnrate.dev, with nothing to install. earnrate.dev and Claude can share one wallet. No account and no affiliate links; the hosted server counts requests by tool name, nothing about what you ask. See the privacy page.
U.S. cards and U.S. merchants, for now.
> Status: early, and it works: the engine, CLI, optional Claude merchant lookup, MCP server and the hosted Claude connector. See the benchmark (run 2026-11-03) for how it compares to an existing card-picking MCP server.
## Try it
Needs Node 22 or later (the published package is compiled JavaScript).
sh
npm install -g earnrate
earnrate restaurants # the best cards earnrate knows, no setup
earnrate trader joes --cards amex-gold,chase-prime-visa # just these cards
earnrate whole foods 80 # add an amount to see the dollars back
You never have to enter your cards: with none, every answer covers every card earnrate knows. To have earnrate remember yours, track caps and welcome bonuses, and give a cheat sheet for your own wallet, save them:
sh
earnrate cards sapphire # find your cards' IDs
earnrate add chase-sapphire-preferred
earnrate add amex-gold
earnrate whole foods 80
Adding a card tells you anything else it needs to earn correctly, such as the categories you picked on Cash+, Amazon Prime for Prime Visa's 5%, or which rotating categories you've activated. earnrate update and earnrate memberships set those. Memberships and point values (earnrate values) can be saved without any cards, and every answer uses them. Using an AI assistant instead? Add earnrate to it and ask; name your cards or save them there.
With the example wallet, it prints:
Whole Foods Market · $80
Use Blue Cash Preferred: 6% back, about $4.80. High confidence.
1. Blue Cash Preferred 6% $4.80
6% cash back on supermarkets. ...
2. Prime Visa 5% $4.00
5% cash back on Whole Foods Market, with Amazon Prime. ...
3. Amex Gold 4% $3.20
4x Amex Membership Rewards on supermarkets. ...
Valued at 1¢ per point: 4% back.
6 more cards (--all lists them)
Amex Gold beats Blue Cash Preferred here if Amex Membership Rewards (MR) points are worth more than 1.5¢ (you value them at 1¢).
Assumes Whole Foods Market codes as supermarkets (MCC 5411).
Point values: Amex Membership Rewards (MR) at 1¢, SoFi Member Rewards at 1¢ and Chase Ultimate Rewards (UR) at 1¢.
Options: --online or --in-store, --paying card|apple-pay|google-pay|paypal, --valuation flat|points-heavy, --cards, --member, --category, --all, --json, --date, --country. Run earnrate --help for details. To keep the wallet somewhere else, set EARNRATE_WALLET to its path.