MaxRewards alternative: card offers without sharing your bank passwords

If you've looked at card-rewards apps, you've probably found MaxRewards. It does a real, useful thing: it pulls the card-linked offers sitting on your accounts (the "5% back at a store" deals) and auto-activates them so you don't have to click each one. That's the feature people pay its ~$100/year Gold tier for, and it's genuinely valuable.

There's a catch worth understanding before you sign up — and it's the reason cashew exists in the shape it does.

What MaxRewards does well

Credit for credit: auto-activating card-linked offers is the single most-loved feature in this category, and MaxRewards built its product around it. If you have a lot of cards, manually opening each issuer's offers page and clicking "add to card" on dozens of deals is tedious, and easy to forget. Automating that is a real time-saver and it surfaces statement credits you'd otherwise leave on the table.

The catch: it signs in as you

To activate offers on your behalf, MaxRewards needs to act as you inside your card accounts. That means connecting your card logins so the app can authenticate and click on your behalf. Handing your bank and card credentials to a third-party app is exactly the thing security-conscious people are told never to do — and it's the most common hesitation you'll see about apps in this category.

It's not that the company is malicious. It's that the model asks you to trust a third party with the keys to your financial accounts. For a lot of people, the offers aren't worth that trade.

How cashew gets you the same offers — without your password

cashew delivers the same payoff with the opposite security model:

• cashew never asks for, sees, stores, or transmits your bank login. When you're already logged into your bank in your own browser, the cashew extension reads the offers on the page you're looking at and can activate them — using your authenticated session, not credentials you've handed over.
• It works across six issuers today — Chase, American Express, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citi, and U.S. Bank — and surfaces those activated offers right when they apply at checkout, so you don't miss credits you already qualified for.
• Optional bank sync is read-only, through Plaid — a tokenized, revocable connection you control, never a shared password. And it's optional: the entire core product works without connecting anything.

Same outcome — your offers, activated, surfaced at the right moment — without giving an app the keys to your accounts.

And the rest of the product comes with it

Offers are one feature. cashew is also the answer to the question you have on every purchase:

• Which Card? — search any merchant and see your wallet ranked, with the reason for each pick ("Amex Gold, 4x dining = $0.06 per dollar").
• At checkout — the browser extension (and the iOS Safari extension) shows your best card on the page before you pay.
• On your phone — a home or lock screen widget for "best card right now," and a Siri shortcut so you can just ask.
• Gaps and welcome bonuses — see where your wallet underperforms and track spend toward each new-card bonus.

And the ranking works for you, not for us

The other half of trust is what gets recommended. cashew ranks your cards by projected dollars earned — the reward rate times what those rewards are actually worth — never by which card pays us a commission. A card we earn nothing from is still ranked first if it's the best card for you, and we never bury a better option. (We can earn a referral fee if you choose to apply for a new card through a link, that's disclosed, and it has zero effect on which of your existing cards we tell you to use.)

MaxRewards vs cashew, side by side

	MaxRewards	cashew
Auto-activated card-linked offers	Yes	Yes — across 6 issuers
Requires your card/bank login	Yes — signs in as you	No — uses your own browser session
Bank sync model	Credential-based	Read-only via Plaid (optional)
Which card to use, per merchant	Yes	Yes
Ranking incentive	—	Your projected dollars, never commission
Where it lives	App	Web, browser extension, iOS app + Safari, widget, Siri
Price	~$100/year (Gold)	Free core; $29.99/year premium (Plaid sync)

The honest version of "free"

It's fair to ask how cashew makes money. Two ways, both disclosed: an optional premium tier (read-only bank sync via Plaid), and a referral fee if you decide to apply for a new card through a cashew link. Neither one requires your passwords, and neither one changes which of the cards you already own we tell you to use.

If the offers feature drew you to MaxRewards but the credential-sharing gave you pause, that pause is the whole reason cashew is built the way it is: the same activated offers, the best card every time — without handing over the keys.

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cashew is not a financial advisor. Recommendations are based on published reward structures and your own cards, and are not paid placements. cashew may earn a referral fee if you apply for a new card through our links; see our affiliate disclosure. Comparisons reflect publicly available information about other products as of June 2026 and may change.