Where our numbers come from
Every figure on this site traces to a source we can name, with the date that source assigned it. Here is the chain, including the parts that are still weaker than we would like.
3 min readEach figure carries its own date
We publish financial terms in a category where being wrong has consequences beyond a correction. This page describes how a number gets onto a page here, and where the chain is still weaker than we would like it to be.
We currently publish 102 cards.
Card terms come from a verified catalogue
Rates, fees, and card terms live in a database, versioned so that a change creates a new record rather than overwriting the old one. Nothing is typed into an article. When you see a fee in a sentence on this site, it was read from that catalogue at the moment the page rendered.
That rule is why this paragraph cannot tell you what a specific card charges without pulling it from the catalogue: the annual fee on the card we use most in examples is $192, and if the issuer changes it, this sentence changes with it.
External figures come from named sources with dates
Some numbers are not about a card at all. Exchange rates and the policy rate come from the Bank of Canada. Those arrive through an interface, are stored with four things attached, and are shown only while they are current.
The four things are the exact request we made, the moment we retrieved it, the date the source itself assigns to the value, and the raw response as it was served to us.
The third of those is the one that does real work. An interface can serve yesterday's value today, and a retrieval timestamp alone cannot tell the difference. Keeping the source's own date separate is what makes the gap visible instead of invisible.
When a source goes quiet, the number disappears
If a source stops responding, or the value we hold falls outside the window we consider current for that source, the figure is removed from the page rather than shown with a warning beside it.
This is deliberate, and it is the part most likely to look like a bug. A stale rate shown with a caveat is still a number a reader will act on. A missing rate is not.
The same logic applies to the site's own verification date, which is computed from the catalogue rather than written into the template. If our ingest stops, that claim degrades to an explicit notice instead of freezing at a date that would keep looking authoritative long after it stopped being true.
What this does not cover
Being honest about the limits is part of the method.
Automated checks confirm that figures are computed in the right place. They cannot confirm that the underlying catalogue is accurate, that a rate matches what an issuer currently advertises, or that a term was transcribed correctly in the first place. Those remain human work, and a passing check is not a claim that they were done.
Our value estimates also carry modelling limits we state wherever the number appears: category earn caps are not applied, welcome bonuses are excluded, insurance and lounge benefits are not valued, and first-year fee waivers are not amortised.
What to do with a number you doubt
Confirm it with the issuer before you act on it. We say this on every page, and we mean it as more than a disclaimer: our catalogue is a comparison tool, and the issuer's disclosure is the contract.
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