Where the rates come from
We track six US cashback sites — TopCashback, Rakuten, BeFrugal, RebatesMe, Swagbucks and Freecash. Once a day we read each site's own published rate for every store it lists, straight from their public rate feeds. We don't set, negotiate or estimate rates; we report what each one is advertising and show them side by side.
When rates were last checked
Every store is re-checked daily. The "rates updated Oct 24, 2026" date on the homepage is the date of the most recent successful check, read from the data itself — not a live clock, so it can never claim to be fresher than it is. Each store page also banks a daily snapshot, so you can see how its best rate has moved over time.
How "up to" rates are handled
Many portal rates are a maximum: the headline figure applies only to certain departments, specific products, or new customers. Whenever a portal flags its rate as a ceiling, we show it as "Up to X%" and never drop that qualifier — on the store card, the store page and in the underlying data. Treat "up to" as a best case, not a guarantee, and check the portal's terms before you buy.
New-customer vs existing-customer rates
The portals publish a single headline rate per store — they don't split new- and existing-customer rates in their feeds, so we can't either. Where a headline is a new-customer or launch rate, it shows as the "up to" figure. This is a genuine limitation of the source data, and we'd rather say so than imply a precision we don't have.
Temporary boosts and promotions
The daily rate reflects whatever a portal is advertising that day, including limited-time boosts. That's why a store can jump from 2% to 10% during a promotion — and why it can drop back. We don't hide, smooth or average these out; the rate history on each store page shows the movement.
How we compare dollars and percentages
We never convert between the two. Stores that pay a percentage are ranked by percentage. Flat-dollar sign-up bonuses (a "$50 when you spend $50" deal) are a different kind of reward and are kept separate — a dollar bonus is never blended into a percentage-back ranking, because the two aren't comparable on a single number.
Do affiliate relationships affect what you see?
No. Some outbound links are referral links, marked with an asterisk*; if you join a portal through one, we may earn a commission at no cost to you. It never affects which stores are listed and never affects the order they appear in. Stores are ordered by their cashback rate (or, on the homepage's "Popular" view, a fixed list of the best-known retailers) — there is no paid placement, and no portal or retailer can pay to rank higher. We're not owned by, or affiliated with, any of the six sites or the retailers shown.
Why some rates look oddly precise
A few rates read unusually specific — 7.07%, 10.1%, 15.15%. These are shown exactly as the portal publishes them. Portals sometimes quote uneven figures: a rate tied to a points value, a mid-promotion change, or a currency conversion on their end. We report the published number rather than rounding it, so what you see matches what you'll get on the portal.
Gift-card rates — the second way to save
Alongside the portals, we compare discounted gift cards from three sources — Freecash, TopCashback and Fluz. Buying a brand's gift card below face value is its own kind of cashback: the saving is baked in, and it lands instantly instead of pending for weeks.
Discount or cashback? Both, depending on the source — some sell the card below face value (a $100 card for $92), others credit a percentage back after you buy. Either way we express it as a single "% back" so it compares like-with-like against the portals. A "Boosted" tag marks a temporary promotional rate.
How we match cards to stores. Each gift-card brand is matched to its retailer by a normalised name key, so the Nike card lines up with Nike's portal rates on the same page. A brand with no clear retailer match still appears in the gift-card directory, just not on a store page.
Which rates we show. We show each source's standard rate for a US account. We don't include one-off sign-up bonuses, referral-only boosts or personalised account-specific rates, because they aren't something every reader can get.
Combining the two ("stacking"). When a store has both a portal rate and a discounted gift card, the two can sometimes be combined — buy the discounted card, then pay with it while clicking through a portal. The "potential combined return" we show is simply the two rates added together. It's a best case, not a promise: some portals don't track orders paid with a gift card, and some exclude certain categories or third-party cards. We label it as potential and tell you to check the portal's payment and exclusion terms — we don't individually verify each retailer's stacking eligibility.
Reward sites — the third way to earn
Cashback portals and gift cards both save money on things you were buying anyway. Reward sites (also called get-paid-to sites) are a different thing: they pay you for doing tasks — surveys, app trials, offers, playing games — usually as points you cash out to PayPal or gift cards. To be clear, we don't pay anyone; the reward sites do. We compare them so you can find the one that pays best for what you're actually willing to do.
Which sites are in the directory. We keep a hand-checked directory of 157 reward sites and apps. Every entry is verified by a person, not scraped in bulk: we confirm it's a real, active earning site, drop the junk (crypto faucets, gift-card resellers, pure-loyalty apps and anything sketchy), and read each app's own store listing for its rating, platforms and countries. Where several brands are just skins of the same operator, we group them under that owner rather than pretending they're separate.
How the ranking works — the World Cup. There's no way to score reward sites on a single published number the way we can with cashback rates, so instead of inventing an editorial ranking we let readers vote. You're shown two sites and pick the one you'd rather earn on — or "never heard of either", which gently lowers both, because recognition counts. Every vote feeds an Elo rating (the chess ranking system): beating a strong site is worth more than beating a weak one, and the live standings re-sort on every vote.
Making the votes trustworthy. With well over a hundred sites and a limited pool of votes, a couple of us keep the ranking honest. Sites you haven't been shown are prioritised, so every site gets matchups rather than the same few appearing over and over. Once a site has some rating, it's matched against others of similar rating — so the strong sites actually face each other instead of farming easy wins. And any site with fewer than 12 matchups is flagged "settling" and held below the fully-rated sites, so a lucky early win can't fake a top spot. One judgment per pair per browser, and rate-limited voting, keep it from being stuffed.
In short
6 portals and three gift-card sources, read daily, shown as they advertise — maximums labelled "up to", dollars and percentages kept apart, combined returns flagged as potential, and ordering driven by rate, never by who pays us. If you ever spot a rate that looks wrong, it's almost always because the source changed it since our last check — always confirm before you buy.