How Miles makes money

Last updated: August 20, 2026

Miles is built and run by one person, Andy Assareh. This page says “I” because there is no company. A site that tells you which credit card to use should state how it is paid.

Two income lines. Membership payments and referral links. That is the whole list.

Membership payments

Membership is $5 a month or $50 a year; canceling goes through the billing portal linked from account settings. There are no investors to answer to, so this is the income line the product is built around.

Membership pays for the model calls behind Miles' answers and for maintaining the card dataset. Members have no monthly limit, and Membership adds custom valuations, elite-status tracking, per-card credits and certificates, household profiles, and the watchlist. The card directory, comparisons, and wallet-aware chat remain free.

Referral links

Some cards have a referral link. When Miles recommends a card and an apply link is available, it appears after the recommendation. The answer notes that some links may pay a referral. That note is one line covering every link, not a mark on each, because the card data has one apply-link field per card and does not record which links are referrals. Using a link pays me; it does not change the recommendation.

A referral link is never an input to a recommendation. For a purchase recommendation, Miles computes the result from earning rates and your point valuations. The broader questions, such as what to get next or what to stop paying for, are judgment rather than arithmetic. Miles shows the reasoning and figures behind those answers.

What never happens

  • No ads. Not on any page, not in an answer, not in email.
  • No paid placement. No issuer can buy a position in a recommendation, a card page, or a category ranking. There are no sponsored slots to buy.
  • Your data is not sold, and it is not the product. What you tell Miles about your wallet is used to answer your questions. It is encrypted with a key that belongs to your account; the security page covers how, and where that protection ends.
  • No issuer relationship changes an answer. A referral arrangement pays on a card you decided to get. It buys nothing upstream of that.

How to check any of this

Every site in this category says it is unbiased, so treat the claim above as worth exactly what you can verify:

  • Read the arithmetic on the answer itself. When Miles names a best card for a purchase, the answer shows the multiplier, the valuation, and the return it produces, against your wallet rather than a generic one. It does that whenever the math is the point, not on every answer. You do not have to take any of this on faith, and you do not have to trust me to check it: the numbers are on the page, and they either add up or they do not.
  • Change the inputs and watch the answer move. What a point is worth is a judgment, not a fact, and yours are yours to set. If a recommendation survives your valuations rather than mine, that is worth more than any promise on this page.
  • Read the dataset’s history. Every change to the card data is on the record in the changelog, and how the data is maintained explains what is checked and when.

Questions

Email [email protected]. If something on this page is not true of what you experienced, that is a bug and I want to hear about it.