I run Kiwii, where our mission is to make credit card and loyalty rewards make sense for normal people, both earning points and actually spending them. Behind it is our own database: Hundreds of US credit cards with earning rates, caps and fine print taken from issuer terms rather than marketing pages, plus merchant-level categories, shopping portals, bank, hotel and airline programs, point valuations, and which card to use where. Rankings come from what someone tells us about their spending, not from what pays us most. So I can tell you what the data says rather than what a marketing team wants you to hear: which advertised rates quietly cap out (all the 5 to 6% cash back cards do), what a 14x hotel multiplier is really worth (about half the headline), and how card, portal and progra...