Stack manages the money going out and maximizes what comes back, so the trip you are saving for arrives sooner than the spreadsheet said. Your budget and rewards have one home.
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Free tier, no card required, no bank connection needed to start.
The problem
Categorized, charted, rolled up by month. Every budget app on the market is a very good record of decisions you already made, and none of them is in the room when you make the next one.
A category runs over, an envelope empties, and the app treats an ordinary month as a personal failure. Stack works on surplus instead, because months change and a budget that cannot absorb that is a budget you stop opening in March.
$340 of groceries in July, on the wrong card. Not a rounding error, and not a decision you made. A decision you didn't make.
You paid an annual fee for one and you are about to lose the rate on the other. Both dates are knowable in advance, and Stack tracks every cap and credit in your wallet so you stop losing them by accident.
Half one · the budget
Categories, transactions, net worth, goals. The part you already rely on, built properly rather than as a wrapper around the interesting feature. Then a column showing what each category earned you back, which no budget app can compute because none of them knows what your cards pay.
| A | B | C | D | |
| 1 | Category | Spent | vs June | Earned back |
| 2 | Groceries | 520.00 | +8% | 13.60 |
| 3 | Dining | 340.00 | −12% | 8.56 |
| 4 | Shopping | 285.00 | +2% | 5.70 |
| 5 | Utilities | 210.00 | 0% | 4.20 |
| 6 | Gas | 145.00 | −4% | 4.35 |
| ⋮ | 2 more rows | |||
| 9 | Total | 1,690.00 | 41.20 | |
The budget
Every category carries what you spent, how it moved against last month, and what it earned you. That last column is the whole difference. A budget app can tell you groceries were $520. Stack shows that $13.60 came back, and whether a card already in your wallet would have taken it further.
Half two · the cards
Max
You ask which card, or Stack tells you before you ask. The answer comes from your wallet, your spending, the merchant category, and the cap state of every card you hold. Never from what Stack would earn.
"Dinner out tonight, about $90. Which one?"
Gold pays 4x at restaurants worldwide on the first $50,000 a year and you are nowhere near it. Flex pays 3x on dining year-round rather than rotating. Neither is at risk of capping, so the higher rate wins outright. Both are shown at the 1 cent floor, and both can be worth more on a transfer.
Cap Tracker
Bonus categories have ceilings and most people meet them by accident. Stack projects the fill date from your own pace and tells you which card takes over when it lands. Statement credits get the same treatment.
Coming from somewhere else
If you came from Mint, or you are on Monarch or Copilot now, the budgeting half will feel familiar. If you use a card optimizer, the which-card half will. The last column needs both, which is why it is empty everywhere else.
| Reads your transactions | Budget tracking | Which card to use | What you actually missed | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Budget appsSEE YOUR SPENDING | ● | ● | ○ | ○ |
| Card optimizersKNOW THE CARD TERMS | ○ | ○ | ● | ○ |
| StackBOTH HALVES | ● | ● | ● | ● |
A card optimizer cannot tell you what you missed, because it never sees the purchase. A budget app sees every purchase and does not know what a card pays. Missed rewards is the product of both, and it is the number this whole app exists to produce.
A card recommendation should answer one question: which of the cards you already carry pays most for this purchase. The moment it also answers which card pays us most, it has stopped being a recommendation.
Stack's engine never sees affiliate money. Not weighted, not ranked, not used to break a tie. We wrote that down before there was any affiliate revenue to be tempted by, and we publish an audit that checks it, whatever the audit finds.
Here is every dollar Stack could earn from you, and exactly where the wall sits.
Pricing
The difference between Free and Pro is not a list of switched-off features. Free gives you the whole card engine and nothing synced to run it on. Connect your accounts and the same engine runs on everything.
Free
$0
The full card engine, on the transactions you enter yourself.
Pro
$9.99 / mo
Or $99.99 a year. Your accounts connected, so the engine runs on everything.
Founding Member
$89.99 / year
Everything in Pro. Your rate never increases as long as your subscription stays active.
When they are gone the tier closes permanently and the public price applies. This cap will not be raised.
Lifetime
$249 once
Everything in Pro, for as long as Stack exists, including whatever Pro becomes.
When they are gone the tier closes permanently. This cap will not be raised.
Every payment is refundable within 7 days. Full refund terms in the Terms of Service. Purchases made through the App Store are refunded by Apple under Apple's policy.
Pricing opens at launch. Joining the list gets you the first invitations and does not hold a slot. Both counters read zero because nothing has been sold.
Questions
The budgeting half should feel familiar: categories, transactions, rules, net worth, goals. What is new is a column those apps cannot fill. Stack knows what each of your cards pays, so every category carries what it earned you back and what it should have earned. If you are on YNAB, Stack is not zero-based envelope budgeting and does not try to be. It runs on a surplus model instead, which is a different approach rather than a better one, and worth knowing before you switch. If you are on Monarch or Copilot, the closest comparison is that plus the rewards half, with a free tier underneath it.
Not automatically today. Stack reads your transaction history through Plaid on Pro, which reconstructs up to two years directly from your bank rather than from an export, so for most people that is a better starting point than an import anyway. What it will not carry over is your old categories and rules, and we would rather tell you that now than after you have signed up. Import is on the roadmap rather than in the product. A public roadmap goes up shortly after launch, and what users ask for moves things on it.
No. Stack operates on whatever data you choose to give it, and the card engine is not gated. On Free you get the full which-card engine running on the transactions you enter yourself. Connecting your accounts through Plaid is what changes: current transaction data, arriving automatically, so Missed Rewards runs every month without you typing anything. What the connection buys is coverage, not capability.
A catalog maintained by hand against issuer terms rather than scraped from comparison sites. Multipliers, caps, rotating categories, statement credits and their reset dates, including the exclusions most lists leave out, like the fact that warehouse clubs and superstores do not earn the supermarket rate. Changes follow live information from the issuers. If you find an error in it, you can report it from inside the app, and we would rather hear it from you than not.
Honest answer, we are new, and we are competing on permanence rather than on a sale. Founding Member pricing is $89.99 a year for the first 1,000 paid signups, and your rate never increases as long as your subscription stays active, under the conditions set out in our Terms. After the cap fills, the public price moves to $99.99 to sit in line with the category. Plenty of apps discount below their list price, then raise it again.
Four promises and four named conditions that would break them, published with an escalation path that routes to the founder. A card recommendation in Stack is never weighted by what Stack would earn. If you ever apply for a card through us the issuer may pay a referral, and that is the only place affiliate money touches the product. We audit it quarterly and publish the result, including the periods where there is nothing to report.
No, and the privacy policy closes its list rather than leaving it open. Eight named processors, no advertising platforms, no "and our partners" clause. Your transaction data does not train AI models and is not sold or shared. Plaid holds your bank credentials and they never touch Stack's servers. You can read the whole thing, and it names every third party that touches your data.
Invitations go out in waves, and the list gets them first.
We handle your email address as described in our Privacy Policy.