Two different products share this name
If you search "credit card optimizer," most of what comes back falls into two categories that have nothing to do with each other:
- Debt-payoff calculators — tools that take your card balances, interest rates, and credit limits and tell you the fastest or cheapest way to pay off debt through balance transfers.
- Rewards-tracking apps — tools like CardPointers, MaxRewards, WalletFlo, and Rich With Points that watch your existing wallet and tell you, transaction by transaction, which card in your pocket earns the most at checkout.
Both are useful for what they do. Neither does what the phrase actually implies for a lot of people who search it: which cards should I even have, and where should each dollar of my spend go?
What a rewards tracker actually optimizes
A rewards tracker starts from the cards you already own. Its job is per-swipe: you're standing at checkout, you open the app, and it tells you to tap the card in slot 3 because that one earns 4x on gas this quarter. That's a real, useful problem — but it takes your wallet as a given. It doesn't tell you whether your wallet is the right wallet, whether a $95 annual fee is earning its keep, or whether adding or dropping a card would change the answer for every other card you hold.
What this app optimizes instead
OptimalCardSetup starts one step earlier: which cards should be in your wallet at all, and how your actual monthly spend should route across them. It isn't a per-swipe reminder — it's a constraint solver (Google OR-Tools CP-SAT) that takes your spend across dining, groceries, travel, gas, and 20+ other categories, checks it against a catalog of 50+ cards' earn rates, caps, and annual fees, and searches for the combination that maximizes net value — fees included — for your numbers specifically.
The distinction that matters: a rewards tracker can tell you which of your current cards to use right now. It can't tell you that swapping one card for another would net you more over a year, because it isn't solving the wallet-selection problem at all — that's a different, harder computation, and it's the one this app is built around. You can see how two specific cards stack up on the comparison pages, or browse the full catalog.
An example of what "solver-verified" looks like
We don't publish savings numbers we can't point to a run of. Our Q3 2026 two-card wallet report ran the live production solver — not a spreadsheet estimate — across four synthetic spend profiles, comparing the free tier's 2-card limit against a 5-card premium setup, and found an average gap of roughly $190/year between them. That's one report's specific finding for its stated assumptions, not a promise about what your own wallet will show — the only way to know your number is to run your own spend through the solver.
When you'd want each tool
- Use a rewards tracker if your question is "which of my existing cards should I use for this specific purchase today."
- Use this app if your question is "should I be carrying these cards at all, and is there a combination that would earn more for what I actually spend."
They're not really competitors — they answer two different questions. If you landed here searching "credit card optimizer" looking for the second one, this is that tool.
Try it
Run the optimizer — free for up to 2 cards, no signup required to see a first result.