Guides & reviews

Most credit card writing in India falls into one of two traps: a press release with the fee table pasted in, or a list ranked by whoever pays the most per application. This library is the attempt at a third thing — cards and reward programmes explained closely enough that you can check the working, and honestly enough that the conclusion sometimes is "this card is not worth it."

Reviews and guides do different jobs

A review covers one card. It sets out the fees as they are actually charged, the reward rate by category with the caps and exclusions that apply, what the perks are genuinely worth against what they are advertised at, and who the card suits — which is usually a narrower group than the marketing suggests.

A guide covers everything else: a reward programme end to end, a transfer partner's chart, a spending category and which cards serve it, or a piece of the fee-print that applies market-wide. Guides are where the arithmetic lives, because most of what makes a card good or bad is not specific to the card.

If you are deciding between two named cards, start with the reviews. If you are trying to work out what you should be optimising for at all, start with the guides.

How this gets written

Every number in a review traces back to the issuer's own published terms — the schedule of charges, the most important terms and conditions, the reward programme's own documents. Where an issuer's own pages disagree with each other, which happens more often than it should, the card-specific document wins over the general one, and we say so.

Card terms move constantly. Rates get cut, caps appear where there were none, and categories quietly become excluded. We track those changes with dates and record what actually changed rather than what the issuer's email said changed — the change tracker is the running log, a card's own review carries its history, and each week's changes are written up with the record underneath in the press room.

Two consequences worth stating plainly. Reviews are updated when the terms move, not on a schedule, so the useful question about any figure here is when it was last verified rather than when the piece was published. And where we cannot verify something, the piece says so instead of rounding to a confident number.

What you will not find here

• Ranked-by-commission lists. No issuer can buy a position, a rating, or a verdict. How we make money sets out the whole arrangement.
• Issuer card artwork. Every card image on this site is our own illustration. We do not host or hotlink issuer photography.
• Perks priced as cash. Lounge access and concierge are real, and we list them on every card, but we deliberately do not count them as rupees in a ranking — see the methodology for why that decision changes which cards look good.

The numbers behind the writing

Most reward maths turns on one figure nobody publishes: what a point is actually worth. A card earning five points per hundred rupees is either excellent or mediocre depending entirely on whether those points redeem near a rupee or nearer twenty paise.

So we compute it, per card and per programme, and publish the whole table in the point valuation index rather than burying an assumption inside a verdict. The transfer guides do the same for airline and hotel partners, where the ratio — not the earn rate — is what decides whether a travel card is worth its fee.

Where to start

If you want the single most useful piece here, it is the point valuation index: it changes how every other number on the site reads. If you are shopping, the category shortlists are the fastest route to a small set of candidates, and the bank hubs explain how each issuer's reward currency actually works before you commit to collecting it.

Everything published is listed below, reviews first and then guides.