About CheckBeforeYouShop

Shopping portals pay you to start your purchase through them — cash back, airline miles, or credit-card points. The rates change all the time, and the same store can pay 2% on one portal and 10% on another on the same day. Portal comparison sites have existed for years; they show you the numbers. CheckBeforeYouShop's job is to show you answers.

What "answers" means

• Is this rate actually good? Every store page compares today's rate to that store's own history — not a gut feeling, a percentile.
• Points stay points. 3 mi/$ on AAdvantage is shown as exactly that. If you want dollar-equivalent comparisons, you turn on valuation view and set your own cents-per-point assumptions — visible and adjustable, never silently applied.
• 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 read the portals' own public pages automatically, politely (cached, throttled, honoring robots.txt), and store every change — which is what powers the history charts and percentiles. A small number of card-issuer portals sit behind logins; those are checked weekly by a human and labeled accordingly.

How we make money

Referral bonuses on some portal links, always disclosed, never affecting rankings — the full story is on the disclosure page. No display ads.

Who builds this

A points-and-miles person who got tired of tab-cycling through portals before every purchase. CheckBeforeYouShop is a sister project to PointAuctions.