About Us
Cardly is a guide to U.S. consumer credit cards built around a simple idea: every card decision should come with the actual math. Fee minus credits. A welcome bonus benchmarked against the card's own history. What your specific spending pattern earns on this card vs the next. Most recommendations skip that math, Cardly puts it in front of you, alongside the fine print most reviews leave out.
We track the U.S. consumer card market, every major issuer, fee changes, refresh cycles, welcome-bonus history over time, and surface it through tools and guides built to answer concrete questions. A comparison calculator that runs your real spend against up to three cards. A bonus tracker that scores today's offers against each card's own 24-month history. Long-form guides on the mechanics, edge cases, and strategies that don't make the marketing pages. Whether you're applying for your first card or managing a six-card portfolio, the site is built to give you a straight answer.
The site is run by two people. Both of us read every email, reach out via the Contact page.
Hillel Sonnenschine
Hi, I'm Hillel. I started Cardly. My background is in finance, and I've been around the credit-card world for a long time, both as someone optimizing my own setup and as someone who watches the issuer side closely. The thing I kept running into was that nobody was writing the technical side honestly. Every site had the same recycled paragraphs about “great rewards” and almost nothing about how interest is actually calculated, what utilization really does to your score, or what to do when life throws you a curveball that has no clean answer.
On Cardly I cover the financial-mechanics side, APR math, credit-bureau detail, debt strategies, the credit-building path, and the harder specific situations like bankruptcy, divorce, medical debt, and rebuilding after a setback. The guides where the answer is precise rather than reassuring tend to be mine.
Nate Gersten
I'm Nate. I came to credit cards through the travel side. I worked as a travel agent before Cardly, which is closer to the points-and-miles world than people assume. The two run on the same machinery: airline fare classes, hotel award charts, transfer partners, status tiers, the difference between a sticker price and what a seat actually costs in real availability. Spend long enough booking flights and building itineraries for real people and the rewards game stops being abstract. You learn what miles actually buy on a Tuesday in October, what a Park Hyatt suite costs in cash versus points, and which co-branded perks move the needle on a stay versus which just look good on the marketing page.
On Cardly I write the travel and rewards guides: welcome bonuses worth chasing and ones to skip, transfer-partner sweet spots, premium-card math, hotel and airline co-brands, redemption strategy, and the seasonal patterns that decide whether timing an application is worth a few thousand dollars. If a guide is about turning Chase points into a flight you wouldn't pay cash for, that's mine.
What Cardly does
The site has four working surfaces:
- Browse, the catalog. Filter by category, issuer, fee, FX policy.
- Compare, side-by-side comparison of up to three cards with a calculator that estimates your real annual value based on how you spend.
- Bonus Tracker, every card's current welcome bonus benchmarked against its own 24-month history, so you can tell at a glance whether today's offer is great, average, or worth waiting on.
- Learn, long-form guides on the strategies, mechanics, and fine print that actually matter.
How we work
Card data is reviewed on a recurring schedule against issuer pages. Welcome-bonus history is recorded over time so we can show readers when an offer is genuinely elevated versus rebranded as “limited.” Our summaries, calculator math, and recommendations are our own.
When we don't know something, we say so. When a card's welcome bonus is below its historical average, we say so. When a card's annual fee no longer makes sense for most cardholders, we say so.
Editorial integrity
Cardly participates in affiliate programs and may earn a commission when you click through and are approved for a product. Compensation can influence which products we feature and where, but it does not influence the underlying data we publish or our editorial opinions. See our Affiliate Disclosure for the full picture.
We don't accept direct sponsorships or paid placements. If that ever changes, we'll update this page and disclose it clearly on any sponsored content.
Corrections
If you spot something wrong, a wrong fee, a stale bonus, a misclassified perk, tell us via the Contact page. We'll fix it (or explain our methodology) within a few business days.