How We Rank Credit Cards

SwipeSage exists because most “best credit card” content online, articles, comparison sites, even in-app recommendations from other tools, is ranked by whoever pays the biggest commission, not by what’s actually good for you. This page explains exactly how we do it differently, so you don’t have to take our word for it.

Who’s behind this

No bank pays for placement

Not in the app, and not in these reviews. Nothing on this site or in Sage’s recommendations is influenced by which issuer pays the most. If a card has a real catch, we say so, even for cards we might otherwise want to recommend.

How each review is built

Every card teardown starts from the issuer’s own documents, the same ones you’d be agreeing to if you applied. For an Indian credit card there are two that matter, and we read both:

• The Most Important Terms and Conditions (MITC), which carries the fees, charges and interest rates.
• The card’s own Terms and Conditions document, which carries the reward structure, the earning caps, and the list of spends that earn nothing.

That second document is the one almost nobody reads, and it is where the real story usually is. A card’s advertised rate tells you what it pays on the spending the issuer wants to talk about. The terms document tells you what it pays on rent, fuel, utilities, EMI and everything else, and the honest answer is often zero.

So we pull the actual fee, the actual reward rate, the caps and the exclusions directly from those two sources, never from a comparison site’s summary of them, and we cross-check when the documents are ambiguous or contradict each other. Then we write it up as three things: what’s genuinely good, the catch the issuer’s own page will never volunteer, and a plain verdict on who it’s actually worth it for.

That verdict is the part that can’t be copied from anywhere else, and it’s the whole reason these reviews exist.

How we keep it current

Every review shows the date its numbers were last checked against the issuer’s terms. We re-verify every review at least every 60 days, and immediately if we learn a rate or fee has changed. Each re-check reads both documents, because each one answers a different question and neither answers the other’s. Card terms move, and a review that was accurate on publish day can go stale, we treat that as our responsibility to catch, not yours.

Spotted something out of date? Tell us and we’ll check it and correct it, dated, so you can see exactly when it changed.

How we make money

Right now, we don’t.

Some of the apply links on this site and in the app are referral links, the kind that can earn a commission when someone applies through them. None of ours earn us anything today, as of 23 August 2026.

If that changes, this page changes first. And the reviews will be written exactly the same way either way: the catch section stays, the verdict stays, and no issuer will ever be able to buy a position, a rating, or a softer sentence.

The same principle runs through the app

Sage, our free AI credit card advisor inside the app, works from the same catalog and the same honesty principle: it recommends the card that fits how you actually spend. These reviews and the app are the same commitment in two different formats.