From CCPicks (2017) to SwipeCaddy, rebuilt

In the first week of March 2017, I shipped a small app called CCPicks to the App Store and Google Play. It did one thing: you tapped a category — groceries, gas, restaurants — or let a map find the store you were standing in, and it ranked the credit cards you already owned by what each would earn right there. Not which card to sign up for. Which one to pull out of the wallet you already had.

The pitch made sense in 2017: a savings account paid about 1% a year, while a card already in your wallet paid 5% at the grocery store — if you remembered which one. I'm Jangul Aslam, and nine years later I rebuilt that app as SwipeCaddy. This is what changed, what didn't, and the one mistake I was determined not to repeat.

What CCPicks was

It was a labor of love, and it was small. It knew 22 cards. The quarterly 5% calendars — the Chase Freedom and Discover it rotations — I typed in by hand. A couple hundred people ever downloaded it. It never earned a single dollar, and that was fine, because it wasn't built to. It existed for one small, satisfying moment: the one at the register when the answer was simply there.

The thing that killed it

Rewards data rots. Categories flip every quarter, cards get retired, rates change quietly with no announcement — and in CCPicks, every one of those changes meant me, retyping the data by hand. The last post on the CCPicks page, October 2018, reads: "Updated new cash back data for the 4th quarter." Then life won. The updates slowed, then stopped.

Here's the part that actually matters: an app whose entire promise is being right slowly becomes wrong. And an app that quietly misleads you at the register is worse than no app at all. So I took it down. A frozen relic still survives — the original CCPicks Facebook page, untouched since 2018.

Rebuilt around the lesson

SwipeCaddy is CCPicks reborn — the same three ideas at its heart (your cards, spending categories, real merchants), rebuilt around the single lesson that mattered: the answer is only as good as the data behind it.

So the data is the part I engineered hardest. Every rate now carries a verified date. The whole catalog is re-checked against the issuers' own pages every week, not whenever one person finds a spare evening. And anything I can't confirm is flagged, not shown as fact. Where CCPicks had 22 cards typed in by hand, SwipeCaddy has a catalog kept honest by process instead of by my free time — which is the only way an app like this survives past year two.

What hasn't changed

The principle is identical to 2017: no affiliate links, no bank logins, no ranking by commission. SwipeCaddy recommends the card that earns you the most, full stop — it makes nothing when you apply for one, and it never asks to see your accounts. That was true when one person typed 22 cards into a phone in 2017, and it's true now that the numbers come from a transparent, published method.

One housekeeping note, because the name gets crossed with a few soundalikes: it's SwipeCaddy, one word, made by Const Agility, LLC in Texas — the same author as CCPicks, not a rebrand of anyone else's app. This month, nine years after CCPicks first did it, SwipeCaddy 1.0 shipped on the App Store and Google Play. Same idea, finally built to last. Pick the cards you already carry and see what they're worth.