About CheckBeforeYouShop
Shopping portals reward you to start your purchase through them. Portals differ, and they can pay out in cashback, airline miles, or credit-card points. Portals' rates change all the time - the same store can pay 2% on one portal and 10% on another, on the same day and at the same time. A quick, 15 second check before making a purchase is a high reward for not very much time - so: check before you shop. (Completely new to portals? Here's the whole thing in 30 seconds.)
Why I built this
For years, my version of "checking" meant tab-cycling through portals and squinting at rate tables on comparison sites. I used various comparison sites constantly, but was never super happy with them. They show you numbers; they don't answer the question I was actually asking: is this rate any good? Is 6% at this store high, low, or just a Tuesday? If a rate is currently 3%, is there a chance the rate will jump to 10% over the next week? Nothing out there told me. So I built this, for myself first, and for the points-and-miles community that has given so much to me.
The jam incident (or: my credentials)
Proof I take portal rates more seriously than any reasonable person: some years back, a portal deal briefly made every 1-800-Flowers order worth a mountain of Southwest miles, regardless of order size. The cheapest item on the site was a jar of jam. In pursuit of a few hundred thousand miles, I may have purchased roughly eighty jars of jam.
The miles never posted. The jam very much did. Friends and family received artisanal preserves for the holidays that year, I became genuinely good friends with my UPS guy, and the hobby gained one more cautionary tale about big portal plays. This site exists partly so your version of that story ends better than mine.
The claim tracker exists because of my own spreadsheet
For years, every time a portal owed me cashback or miles that never posted, the evidence went into a Google Sheet: screenshots pasted into cells, dates typed by hand, deadlines I mostly discovered after they passed. It worked badly, and I never found a tool that did it properly, so I built one into this site. Every claim you track holds your screenshots and shows the portal's filing deadline, in one place, for every portal you use. It's the part of CheckBeforeYouShop.com I use most myself.
Who builds this
One person, plus AI. There's no team, no funding, and definitely no venture capital, lol. I make the roadmap and make sure the data is the freshest and most reliable portal tracker on the internet. Claude writes a lot of the code and keeps the site and data tidy. If something on the site is great, that was both of us. If something is broken, it was Claude's fault. Tell me on the contact page and I'll fix it.
This is the second site to come out of the same one-person workshop. The first, PointAuctions.com, sits on the other side of the same hobby: it tracks auctions across airline and hotel loyalty programs - Delta SkyMiles, United MileagePlus, Hilton Honors and more - so once you've earned the miles, you can see what those miles could actually go toward. Earn them here, spend them there.
What this site answers
- Is this rate actually good? Every store page measures today's rate against that store's own history and tells you if today's rate is good, great, or below that store's typical range.
- Points stay points. 3 mi/$ on AAdvantage is shown as such. If you want to assign a dollar value to points, sign into your account and do so (we pre-populate some point values, but everyone values points differently). You can then turn on 'Rank by value' on the store's page to see how portals stack up, using your custom point values.
- Freshness is public. Every rate shows when we last confirmed it, and the status page shows exactly how current every portal's data is, including when something breaks on our side.
- Stale data is flagged, not hidden. If we haven't been able to re-check a portal, its rates stay visible with a clear "stale" badge, because a slightly old rate beats a missing one.
Where the data comes from
We check each portal's own pages on a schedule - and gently (we cache, we throttle, and we stay inside what each portal allows). We record every rate change. That's what the history charts and the "is today a good day to make a purchase here?" verdicts are built from.
How we make money
Some portal links pay us a referral bonus. Always disclosed, and it never affects a ranking; the full story is on the disclosure page. We don't run display ads.
The guiding philosophy of the site is that nothing is pay-to-play. Every portal and all rate history is real, and exactly what you would get if you visited the portal's site. We list all portals we can, hard stop. Portals cannot pay us to hide or obfuscate their rankings. If we ever highlight or feature a portal, it will be clearly labeled as such.
What's free, forever
The site exists to share data with the community that's given so much to me. The site's core functionality will always be free: current rates, timestamps, 21 days of rate history, the "is this a good rate or not?" verdict based on all historical data (including beyond the 21 days), and exclusions.
We want you to get the most cashback or points for your purchases. Free members see the same rates, at the same freshness, as paying members.
Premium adds tracking, speed, and depth: more alerts, instant delivery instead of the once-a-day alert email, the full rate archive, and click receipts and claim tracking that don't expire.