One card · One year · Statement of unused benefits

Your cards
owe you money.

A Platinum charges $895 and hands back $3,104 in credits, in fifteen pieces, across twelve months. Almost nobody collects all of it. Credit Buddy is an iPhone app that keeps the ledger for the part you're losing.

Free to download, free for three cards. No account to make, because there is no account.

Amex Platinum Annualised

Hotel credit (FHR / THC)$600

Resy$400

Digital entertainment$300

lululemon$300

Equinox$300

CLEAR Plus$209

seven more credits$995

Credits available$3,104

Annual fee−$895

The card owes you+$2,209

Thirteen tracked credits on one card, straight from Credit Buddy's catalog. Most wallets hold three or four cards like this one.

Why it goes missing 01

Nobody forgets an $895 charge. Everybody forgets a $15 one.

~6 weeks Roughly how long people keep logging credits by hand before they fall behind and stop. An observation, not a study, but it is the failure this app is built around.

The fee arrives once, in one line, on one day of the year. The credits arrive in pieces: fifteen dollars of Uber Cash that resets on the first, a Resy credit that resets quarterly, a hotel credit split across two halves of a year that isn't the calendar year. Each one is too small to remember and too big to shrug off.

That asymmetry is the entire business model. Issuers price the fee against the credits you would collect if you were perfect, and bank the difference when you aren't. The fix is not more willpower. It is a list that keeps itself.

Credit Buddy keeps it. It knows every credit on every card you carry, when each one resets, and which of them you have actually used this period, because you told it in one tap or it read it off a statement you handed over.

What it does 02

Hand it a statement. It finds what you already spent.

Export the PDF from your card's website, or screenshot the app. Credit Buddy reads it on your phone, matches charges against the credits you track, and proposes what to log. A $142 dinner at Resy becomes a $100 Resy credit, because that's what the credit is worth. A Delta baggage fee lands on the airline credit. A credit you no longer have gets skipped.

You approve every line before anything is written. The file is read on the device and deleted after. There is no bank login, because there is nothing to log into.

On-device text recognition Amex · Chase · Citi · Capital One · Wells Fargo · Bilt

Credit Buddy reviewing a statement: seven matches on the Platinum Card, with a Resy charge capped to its $100 credit and a Saks credit skipped because it is no longer tracked.

One number: are you ahead of the fee?

Every card carries a running total of what it has paid back against what it costs. Not a score, not a grade. Dollars, and how many of them are still sitting there unclaimed.

The card below has returned $672 of its $895 fee and is holding another $1,043 the owner hasn't collected yet. That is a different conversation from "is the Platinum worth it."

Counts sign-up bonuses Partial credits count partially

A Platinum Card in Credit Buddy showing $672 of $895 recovered and $1,043 still claimable.

Then the same question, asked of the whole wallet.

Three premium cards can quietly cost two thousand dollars a year. Credit Buddy adds up what every card has actually returned against what every card actually charges, and shows you the number, including when the number is unflattering.

Renewal dates get a warning before the fee posts, not after, which is the only time the information is any use.

Sorted by impact Annual-fee warnings

Credit Buddy's cards screen showing portfolio performance across a Platinum, Gold and Sapphire Reserve, each with how much of its fee it has earned back.

Pick your cards. Everything else fills itself in.

Choose from a catalog of 149 cards across 12 issuers and every credit, reset date, renewal period and earning rate arrives already filled in. Monthly, quarterly, semi-annual, calendar year, card anniversary. The awkward ones are the reason this exists.

The catalog is fetched over the air rather than baked into the app, so when an issuer changes a benefit the correction reaches you without waiting on App Store review.

149 cards Partial usage Reminders before a credit expires

The Credit Buddy tracker showing $2,938 available across 26 benefits, grouped by category and card.

Show your partner the wallet. Not your password.

Household Mirror publishes a read-only copy of your wallet to one person you invite. They see the cards, the credits and what is still unclaimed, on their own iPhone, in the same app. They cannot change anything, and you can stop sharing in one tap.

It rides your own iCloud accounts. No shared login, no third party holding the household's finances, nobody to trust who doesn't already live with you.

Also in the app

Wallet optimizerbest card per category

Points calculatoris this redemption good

Transfer partnerslive bonuses

Widgets & Sirimark used without opening

Backupexport to a file, any time

Notes to the statement 03

Where the data lives

On your iPhone. If you use iCloud, it syncs through your own private iCloud account, which we cannot read. There is no Credit Buddy server holding your wallet, because there is no Credit Buddy account.

What we never ask for

Bank credentials. Not through Plaid, not through screen scraping, not at all. Every competitor that automates credit detection does it by holding your login. This one reads a statement you hand it instead.

What statements do

They are read on the device, turned into proposed entries you confirm, and the copied file is deleted. Nothing is uploaded for processing.

Analytics

Off unless you switch it on, and it is a short fixed list of events: which screens get used, which paywall was shown, whether a purchase completed. Never card names, balances, amounts, redemptions, statements, or anything from a shared wallet.

Your data on the way out

Export the whole wallet to a JSON file whenever you like, and delete everything from Settings in one action. Leaving should be as easy as arriving.

What it costs 04

A tracker that costs $90 a year is part of the problem.

The whole point of this app is that recurring charges quietly outrun the value you get from them. Charging you a subscription to watch your subscriptions would be a joke at your expense.

So Credit Buddy+ is one payment. Not per year, not per device, not per card. If a single forgotten dining credit costs more than the app, the app has done its job.

Free, with no time limit: Three cards with every one of their benefits, the full tracker, the fee-recovery scoreboard, expiry and annual-fee reminders, statement import, the points calculator and Home Screen widgets.
Credit Buddy+ adds: Unlimited cards and reward accounts, advanced notification timing, calendar export, custom categories, and the full wallet optimizer.

Credit Buddy

iPhone · iOS 26 or later

The app$0.00

Three cards, all benefits$0.00

Credit Buddy+, once$9.99

Renewal, ever$0.00

regular price $19.99−$10.00

Total, forever $9.99

Launch price · no subscription

Fair questions 05

If it never sees my accounts, how does it know what I spent?

It doesn't, until you show it. Either you tap a credit as used, which takes a second, or you hand it a statement and it proposes a batch for you to confirm. That is the trade: a little more effort than an app holding your bank password, and none of the risk.

My card isn't in the catalog.

Add it by hand, with whatever benefits you want to track, and tell us so it gets added properly. The catalog is 149 cards across 12 issuers and grows on request.

An issuer changed a benefit. How fast do you follow?

The catalog is fetched over the air rather than baked into the app, so a correction reaches you on your next launch instead of waiting on App Store review. The public change log lives with the catalog itself.

What happens if I stop paying?

Nothing happens, because there is nothing to stop paying. Credit Buddy+ is bought once. It stays bought.

Is my wallet on your servers?

No. It is on your phone, and in your own iCloud if you have it switched on. See the notes above and the privacy policy.

Android?

No, and not soon. This is built on iOS frameworks that do the private, on-device work the product depends on. A worse copy on another platform isn't worth shipping.

Go collect what you already paid for.

Free to download, free for three cards. iPhone, iOS 26 or later.