Which credit card should I get? Price it on your own spend

Every card question reduces to one number per card, worked out for a year, and each step below is where the marketed figure and the real one part company. Do the sum for every card you are considering, including the one you hold. The larger net figure wins; a negative one means the card costs you money to hold.

Take three months of card statements and bank debits, so a single unusual month does not decide the answer. Sort every line into about nine groups: online shopping, food delivery apps, groceries bought in store, dining out, utilities, insurance premiums, fuel, rent paid through a card, and everything else in store. Average each group per month. Then mark, for each card you are weighing, which groups it pays full rate on, which it pays a reduced rate on, and which it excludes.

The two illustrative households below are used for the rest of the page. The first spends ₹39,000 a month on cards, mostly online. The second spends ₹56,000 a month, but ₹20,000 of that is rent paid through a card and much of the rest is in store.

Neither card below is a real product; they are two common shapes, so the arithmetic can be redone on any real card's terms. Card F is a flat cashback card: one rate on almost everything, a small fee, an easy waiver. Card O is an accelerated online card: a high but capped rate on online shopping and food delivery, a low rate elsewhere, more exclusions, a larger fee with a higher waiver, and a milestone voucher.

Here is each household on each card, with every step of the net value sum shown. For household 1, card O's online cashback would be ₹1,000 a month before the cap and is ₹750 after it; the other ₹13,000 of eligible spend earns ₹130. For household 2, card O pays ₹150 on ₹3,000 of online spend and ₹200 on ₹20,000 of other eligible spend, and its counted spend of ₹2,76,000 falls short of both the waiver and the milestone.

The cap cost household 1 ₹3,000 a year: without it, 5 percent on ₹20,000 of online and food spend would be ₹12,000 a year, and the card pays ₹9,000 of that. Its effective rate on online spend is 3.75 percent, not 5. Card O still wins because household 1's counted spend of ₹3,96,000 clears the ₹3,00,000 waiver by ₹96,000 and the milestone by ₹36,000. A lighter year that removes ₹36,000 of counted spend removes the ₹1,000 voucher too.

For household 2, the exclusions decided everything. Counted spend on card O is ₹24,000 short of the waiver and ₹84,000 short of the milestone, which together cost ₹2,180 a year against a household that clears card F's waiver easily. Spending ₹24,000 more a year to reach the waiver earns ₹240 and saves the ₹1,180 fee, but unless those purchases were coming anyway, that is ₹22,580 spent to save a fee, and card O still reaches only ₹4,440, under card F's ₹5,100.

What would change household 2's answer is where its spending goes, not how much. Each rupee moved from in-store groceries to online orders counted as online earns card O an extra 4 percent, or ₹0.48 a year for every rupee of monthly spend moved, while card F pays the same on both.

Household 1 has ₹5,000 a month of online spend above card O's cap, earning nothing there, plus utilities and insurance that card O excludes. Card F would pay on both, so a second card looks like free money. Here are three ways to split, against card O alone at ₹11,560. If you already hold several cards, which of them each category should go on is its own exercise, covered in how to track credit card spending across multiple cards.

The sum assumes the reward is worth its face value, every statement is paid in full, and the spending would have happened anyway. If any of these is false, it points at the wrong card, or at a card when the answer is none.

The terms themselves also move. Issuers change rates, caps and exclusions on existing cards, so a sum done once goes stale; how that played out across cards this year is set out on the credit card devaluation page. If the card you already hold carries a fee, is my credit card annual fee worth it applies the same discipline to what you actually redeemed.

The sum on this page needs two inputs most people estimate badly: what they spend in each category, and which cards they could realistically be approved for. The app works on both. It reads bank and card transaction alerts from email and, on Android, transactional SMS, across all your cards, and sorts the spending into categories, so the profile in the first table comes from your actual debits. Its card discovery then compares that spending with 605 Indian credit cards from 32 issuers and shows the cards matched to where your money goes, filtered by your income so you are not shown cards you are unlikely to get.

What you see is your monthly spend by category across cards, and a shortlist of cards alongside that spending, so you can run the net value sum above on each one with your own numbers. If the card you hold already comes out ahead, that is the answer, and applying for another would cost an enquiry to gain nothing. Unyfy earns a commission if you take a card through it; the spending view is free either way. Install Unyfy on Android, or use the web app at app.unyfy.co.in on an iPhone.