Savewise: An awesome shopping tool (compare portals + find stacks)

I’ve been playing around with a new tool called Savewise (www.getsavewise.com) and I have been really impressed. If you’re an extreme stacker who would love the ability to compare all the major shopping portals and seeing whether there are card-linked offers available without leaving the site you’re browsing, then GetSavewise is worth a look.

Savewise Overview

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Savewise is a tool for comparing shopping portals and identifying stacking opportunities with card-linked offers. Even the version that you can access without creating a (free) account is a reasonably useful alternative to my longtime favorite portal comparison tool, Cashbackmonitor.

But you will definitely want to at least make a free account to get far more value out of the tool with full access to compare portal rates, identify stackable Amex and Chase offers, or even search for products to compare stacks across stores. You can also choose between viewing a list of “publicly discovered” card linked offers or you can connect with your own logins to see which offers you have on your own cards.

If you install the Chrome extension, it gets more useful yet, automatically identifying when you’re on a shopping website and showing you shopping portal offers as well telling you whether there are card-linked offers available for the store you’re visiting.

One thing that really stands out about Savewise is that they have some portals that I haven’t seen covered elsewhere, like the British Airways shopping portal. More notably, Savewise lists both Capital One Shopping (the public shopping portal) and Capital One Offers, which are shopping portal-like offers found within one’s Capital One Credit Card login. I noticed some instances where there was a slight discrepancy between the Capital One Offers rates shown by Savewise vs what we saw in our Capital One accounts, but it was often spot on.

Savewise tiers (Basic, Pro-monthly, Pro-lifetime)

Savewise offers one free and two paid tiers:

• Basic (free): Get access to most current (at the time of writing) Savewise features.
• Pro (monthly, $5 per month / $59 per year): Adds longer offer history, ability to auto-sync offers, ability to set custom point valuations, ability to set alerts
• Pro (lifetime, $99): all of the above plus lifetime access to all pro features
• You can check out the paid tiers here (ⓘ Disclosure Frequent Miler may earn a commission if you click through from this link and make a purchase).

• Note: Frequent Miler has an affiliate relationship with Savewise. We will earn a commission if you click through our link and sign up for the paid version of the tool.

Many users will likely be happy with the free version of the tool, but I’ve been enjoying some of the advanced features as well.

Discount for Frequent Miler readers

Frequent Miler readers can save 20% off the first 3 months of a monthly Pro subscription or 20% off the first year of an annual subscription with code FREQUENTMILER20. You can sign up here (ⓘ Disclosure Frequent Miler may earn a commission if you click through from this link and make a purchase).

How Savewise works

There are two main ways to use Savewise:

1. Searching offers at GetSavewise.com
2. Installing the Savewise Chrome extension.

I’ll give a brief overview of using the desktop site, but after playing with the tool for a while, I think it really stands out as a chrome extension.

Savewise Desktop / Website

Once creating an account at getsavewise.com, you can simply search a store form the main dashboard tool and you’ll be taken to a page comparing shopping portal rates for that store (as seen on the left side below) and any card-linked offers available for that store (shown on the right below). Note that the default view of the shopping portal table is “Comfortable”, but in the screen shot below I have the slider just above the portal rates toggled to “Compact”, which I ironically find to be more comfortable.

You’ll note above that the card-linked offer slider to the top-right of that screen shot is toggled to “My Offers”. You’ll need to install the extension for Savewise to be able to display your offers (more on that in a minute). Without the extension installed, you can see publicly-discovered offers as seen here:

By default, Savewise sorts the value of portal rewards based on Frequent Miler’s Reasonable Redemption Values, though with a pro subscription you can customize your valuations.

The free version of the tool includes a 14-day rate history for each portal individually (Rakuten 14-day history for Dell shown below).

The Pro version gives you access to 270 days worth of data.

Some folks will find this more useful than Cashbackmonitor for seeing a specific (indivudal) portal’s rate history for a specific store. Personally, I prefer Cashbackmonitor for rate history because I can the best rate across all shopping portals and a longer time window (15 months). That longer time window is particularly useful around the holiday shopping period because it means that in early November, I can check and see which portals have historically had increased rates over Black Friday/Cyber Moneday and the rest of the holiday shopping period. The shorter time window offered by Savewise rate history would miss that.

Through the “Top offers” drop down, you can see the top cashback offers and top miles offers as you might expect.

However, frequent shoppers will likely really appreciate the ability to browse top stackable offers between Rakuten and Amex or Chase, with the tool listing at an easy glance the Rakuten offer, card-linked offer, and expiration date.

Savewise also offers a product search that’s still in prototype but shows some real promise as it could provide a great way to find a product at a store you may not have considered that could have a great stacking opportunity. For instance, although the price isn’t attractive enough in this instance, I was surprised to learn that Zappos (which I think of as a show store) carries Tumi bags. I can certainly imagine identifying great stacking opportunities this way.

Chrome extension

I tend to be hesitant to install browser extensions mostly for the fear of those extensions “stealing” a click from a shopping portal (and subsequently invalidating the rewards I intended to earn for my purchase) and because I tend to prefer less tracking as opposed to more. I initially installed the Savewise app in an additional Chrome profile to avoid letting it track more of my browser usage than I’d like, but after getting used to the extension, I feel pretty tempted to toss it in a browser instance that I use more often and I intend to install it in “Player 2’s” browser.

Here’s why: the extension monitors the sites you browse and when you land on a site that has shopping portal offers and/or card-linked offers, the extension pops right up to let you know.

I really like the combination of knowing that there are portal rewards and card-linked offers. I can’t count the number of times my wife has asked me whether one site or another has any card-linked offers available and then I usually have to dig through stuff to answer the question. I love that Savewise could pop up right in her browser. Furthermore, you can easily expand the portal information to see a number of portals and best rates for quick and easy comparison without even leaving the site you’re shopping.

The extension is set to display whether the site you are visiting has portal rewards, card-linked offers, or both. In my tests, it worked automatically with an impressive number of websites. For instance, I prefer to buy my eyeglasses from Kits.com, which I find is much less well-known than other online glasses stores, yet Savewise popped up a moment after landing on the Kits home page to let me know that I could get 2% back via a portal.

That’s really convenient. I love the convenience especially for my Player 2, who sometimes forgets to check for portal rewards before placing a purchase. I find the interface here really slick and easy to compare portals and then to click through to the portal you want to use.

I noted above that it is possible to sync your own Amex Offers and Chase Offers to Savewise. When I logged in to an Amex account in the browser with Savewise installed, I was prompted to sync up my offers. I did that in my test instance and then the website was able to show which offers I had on my own cards. I found it especially useful that it shows which cards have a specific offer so that I would know to skip straight to my Schwab Platinum card or Business Green Rewards card rather than hunting through all of my cards for a particular offer.

I didn’t sync up my Chase Offers yet, so I appreciated being able to view all publicly-discovered offers so that I could also monitor whether I might have other options to check.

Speaking of additional options, I understand that Savewise is going to be adding more to expand beyond Amex Offers and Chase Offers, which I think will make the tool even better.

I should note that I did run into a couple of instances (over dozens and dozens of store tests) where the Savewise extension didn’t immediately find portal or card-linked offers despite those offers showing up when searching the merchant through getsavewise.com. When I contacted support, they told me that when this happens it is typically a quick fix on their end to get those stores to display in the future, so reach out and let them know if and when you’re on a store and the extension only shows this instead of portal rates and card-linked offers.

Bottom line

Savewise is a tool that’s been on my radar for a while. I finally got a chance to dedicate some time to using it and I’m loving it so far. I’ve long been a Cashbackmonitor user, but Savewise seems to kick things up a notch with the browser extension and easy integration with a couple of the most popular card-linked offer platforms. If Savewise is able to expand upon its card-linked offer base, I could see this being my go-to tool for shopping that would save me time and effort in identifying the best combinations for savings.

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