This Easy Hack Can Double Your Credit Card Rewards

Money left ripe for the plucking does you no good if you never notice it’s there. It may not grow on trees, but if you’re neglecting credit card cashback and rewards, then you may as well be letting money rot on the vine.

The average American has 3.9 credit cards, according to Experian. Many have more. With nearly every card these days having a unique rewards program, it’s easy to be overwhelmed with keeping up which give you how much at which places. Enter Kudos, a free browser extension that tells you which of your credit cards will nab you the most reward points, miles or cash back for whichever page you’re shopping.

always pay with the best card

“We believe that many folks are leaving money on the table when it comes to maximizing their credit card rewards and benefits, which is why we created Kudos,” writes Kudos. If you’re anything like me, you’ve got a credit card best for buying airline tickets, restaurant meals, and taxi rides, another card best for gasoline and groceries, and another card best for earning cash back. And after that, I just plain forget. Never mind that several of my cards swap reward rates and categories every three months. It’s mind boggling to keep up with. Too many times I’ve logged into one card or another to pay my monthly bill and saw that if I’d used a particular card for last week’s Home Depot purchase or Backcountry purchase, I’d have gotten more rewards. Oops. Too late. Happens all the time.

For October 2024, Kudos users will earn 5x the rewards at 15 select retailers. That means that your overall rewards rate could be 25% for retailers such as Expedia, Backcountry, Booking.com, Nike, HalloweenCostumes.com, PetSmart, and more.

“Kudos is like Apple Pay, Honey, and Nerdwallet, all-in-one,” is how Kudos describes itself. Like Honey does with coupons and discount codes, Kudos does the work of figuring out how to maximize your savings—or in this case, rewards—so that you don’t have to scour all your cards’ terms and benefits yourself. You tell Kudos which credit cards you have, and when you’re shopping any one of (more than) 15,000 participating online stores it’ll tell you which one of your cards you should use. If you follow its recommendation, you’ll collect the maximum number of reward points, miles, or cash back. Even if your card doesn’t earn any rewards, you earn Boost points at a 1% rate. So $300 spent nets you 300 Boost points if none of your cards offer anything better. Every time you accrue 1,000 Boost points, you can redeem them for a $10 Amazon gift card.

AUTOFILL YOUR CARD INFO WITH ONE CLICK

More than being a rewards finder, Kudos is also a payment solution. Like Apple Pay (or Google Pay or Samsung Pay), all your credit card information is stored securely so that you can make purchases online in one click. Even the CCV (security code) is saved, so you never have to fumble around for your wallet to yank out your card for a look. Because of that, though, it’s important to make sure that only you (or very trusted others) have access to your log-in information.

Kudos has been around for two years, now. Founded by ex-Google, PayPal, and Honey engineers, they say they’ve attracted more than 200,000 users who’ve earned a total of over $150 million in rewards since they launched.

DISCOVER YOUR NEXT CARD

It shouldn’t take a crystal ball to figure out your next credit card. Kudos’ CardMatch offers you credit card recommendations that seem like the best match for your uses. Users are able to access the highest sign-up bonuses on offer for each new credit card, thanks to Kudos’ partnership with The Points Guy, a trusted financial advice website that’s particularly zeroed in on making sense of credit card rewards, airline miles, and the overall worth of the mess of credit cards on the market these days.

Rewards are a low-risk opportunity to cash on in purchases you (ideally) were going to make anyway. But like clipping paper coupons, if you let tracking down the best deals overwhelm you, it can start to feel like it’s not worth it. Kudos looks like an intriguing way to short circuit the pathway to optimizing your rewards. I’m sure I’ve passed up deals just because my addled brain didn’t want the time suck of figuring it out myself. But a percent here, a percent there add up. With a free browser add-on that’ll do the grunt work for me to figure out how to best use the credit cards I already own, I’m not sure I have any good excuses left.