You already earned it.
You just swiped the wrong card.
Arbiter is an offline workbook that models every Indian credit card the way your bank actually calculates rewards — whole ₹100 blocks, monthly caps, excluded categories, real forex markups. It reads your statement, shows you what last year cost you, and tells you which card to reach for before you reach for it.
No login. No bank connection. Nothing leaves your laptop.
| Statement narration | Amount | Card you used | Earned | Card you should have used | Lost |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| IND*AMAZON RETAIL | ₹4,820 | HDFC Millennia1% base rate | ₹48 | ICICI Amazon Pay5% with Prime | ₹193 |
| RAZ*Swiggy Online Order | ₹1,240 | ICICI Amazon Pay1% non-partner | ₹12 | HDFC Millennia5% select merchant | ₹50 |
| CROMA,NOIDA | ₹22,400 | ICICI Amazon Pay1% in-store | ₹224 | SBI Cashbackcap already spent on the 11th | ₹672 |
| FOREX MARKUP CHARGE | ₹1,702 | HDFC Millennia3.5% on a Dubai trip | ₹0 | ICICI Amazon Pay1.99% markup | ₹734 |
| Leaked in one month | ₹1,649 | ||||
Three things on that ledger no comparison site will ever tell you: the cashback cap ran out on the 11th, the forex markup is a fee and earns nothing, and one of those cards charges 1.99% abroad while the other charges 3.5%.
You are not under-spending. You are under-routing.
Every rupee is already leaving your account. The only question is which card it leaves through, and the answer changes with the merchant, the month, and how much of each cap you have left.
₹1,00,000
₹18,000 – ₹36,000
Assumes a 1.5–3.0 point improvement in effective return — the usual range once caps, categories and forex are routed deliberately. Your own figure comes from your own statement.
Two years of swiping right is a business seat to Europe. Two years of swiping wrong is a ₹3,000 shopping voucher. Same spending. Same cards already in your wallet.
Your next holiday is already in your wallet.
It is just spread across four cards, three expiry dates and two transfer partners nobody explained to you. Find your row.
| Monthly spend | Recovered per year | What that actually is |
|---|---|---|
| ₹40,000 | ₹8,000 – ₹14,000 | A domestic return flight, taxes included |
| ₹1,00,000 | ₹18,000 – ₹36,000 | Four nights in Bangkok or Colombo, flights in points |
| ₹2,00,000 | ₹36,000 – ₹72,000 | A one-way business seat to Europe inside two years |
| ₹4,00,000 | ₹72,000 – ₹1,44,000 | A family holiday a year, paid in points |
Ranges, not promises. Award tickets still carry taxes and surcharges, and Arbiter shows you those too — the ticket, not the taxes.
Four steps, and the fourth one repeats forever.
Add your wallet
Pick up to 15 cards from the 132 in the database. Rates, caps, fees and forex come pre-loaded and dated.
Paste your statement
Arbiter reads Indian narrations — gateway prefixes, glued city names, the lot — and tags every row to the card that paid for it.
See the audit
Every mis-routed transaction, what the right card would have paid, and the rupee difference. Ranked by what it cost you.
Check before you swipe
Type the merchant and the amount. Get the card, the points and the rupee value — after caps, after exclusions, after fees.
Built on the arithmetic, not the advertisement.
Every card in India is sold on a headline rate almost nobody earns. Arbiter exists because of the gap between that number and yours.
Knowing what to swipe
- Real earn arithmetic. Your bank doesn't round the way the marketing does. ₹483 on an Axis card earns 8 miles, not 9.66 — it floors to completed ₹100 blocks. Arbiter carries the real rule, card by card.
- Cap burn-down. Tells you the moment a 5% cap is spent for the month, and which card takes over.
- Forex, per card. Real markups, not the 3.5% everyone quotes. Abroad, the best card is usually not the best card at home.
- Fifteen cards, one wallet. Your whole wallet on one dashboard, not one card at a time.
Knowing what it cost you
- The wrong-card audit. Last year's statement, re-run against the right cards, with the rupee gap on every line.
- Bank fees stripped out. Forex markup, DCC, GST, surcharges, late and finance charges, refunds and your own card payments are not spend and earn nothing. Most trackers count them and quietly inflate your return.
- Merchants it remembers. Correct a category once. It stays corrected — and travels with you to the next version.
Knowing what to stop paying for
- Fee-waiver countdown. How far you are from waiving each annual fee, and how many days are left. On the 11th, not on the 31st.
- Milestone runway. How much more on this card unlocks the next voucher.
- The cull list. Which card to close, what it saves in fees, what it costs you in value. Net.
- Fees judged fairly. A ₹12,500 card can out-earn a free one. Arbiter will say so rather than penalise the fee on principle.
Knowing what comes next
- Cards to apply for. Ranked against your real spend from your real statement, net of fee and likely waiver — not a top-ten list written for somebody else.
- What your points are worth. Balances turned into named redemptions, with the transfer partner and the ratio that applies to your card.
- Your valuation, not ours. Disagree with our rupee value for a point? Change one cell. The whole workbook recomputes.
We didn't trust the banks' marketing rates either.
So we tested ours against real statements. The Axis engine was run against an actual rewards ledger: 26 transactions, 26 exact matches, down to the point. HDFC turned out to round differently, so Arbiter models both. When ICICI's own page showed a forex markup of 1.99% against the 3.5% we had, we corrected it and dated the change.
117 of 132 confirmed
Every rate carries the date it was last verified and whether it is bank-confirmed or estimated. We show you the fifteen we are not sure about instead of rounding up to "all".
No bank pays us
The rating engine has no commission input, for any card, in any position. The formula and its weights are published so you can argue with them.
It never stops working
A subscription buys fresh rates, never continued access. Stop paying and you keep a fully working file, frozen at the last rates you received.
The questions worth asking before you pay.
What is Arbiter?
Arbiter is an offline credit card rewards tracker and optimiser for India. It covers 132 Indian credit cards across 16 issuers, reads your card statement, shows what each transaction earned against what it could have earned, and tells you which card to use for any merchant and amount. It runs in Excel or Google Sheets and costs ₹3,999 once.
Isn't this just a spreadsheet?
It is a spreadsheet the way a pricing model is a spreadsheet. 132 cards, 42 spend categories, roughly 15,000 formulas, and earn logic checked line by line against real bank statements. The format is deliberate: it opens offline, never asks for a login, and you own the file.
Why pay when there are free "best card" calculators?
A free calculator answers one transaction in isolation. It does not know your 5% cap ran out on the 11th, that your fee waiver is ₹47,000 away, that 14,000 points expire in March, or what the last twelve months of guessing actually cost you. Use a free tool for a single swipe. Use Arbiter for the wallet.
Do I have to connect my bank or upload a statement anywhere?
No. There is no login, no account aggregator and no server. You paste your statement into a file on your own machine and the data never leaves it.
Won't the rates be out of date in six months?
Rates in this category move constantly, which is exactly why a freshness subscription exists — and why it sells updated rates rather than continued access. If you never renew, your file keeps working on the rates it last received. Nothing breaks.
I only have two cards. Is it worth it?
Possibly not, and you should check before you buy. Two cards is where the single biggest mistake usually lives — everything routed to the card with the better headline rate, losing on the categories that card caps. If your own gap works out to a few thousand rupees a year, don't buy it.
Do credit cards in India still earn rewards on rent?
Almost none do. Most issuers removed rent from reward eligibility, and the platforms that process it charge 1–3%. Rent still counts toward annual fee waivers and milestone spends on many cards, which is a real reason to route it deliberately. Arbiter marks which cards do which.
₹3,999
Yours for life. Rate updates optional.
It pays for itself in under two months of not guessing.
At ₹1,00,000 a month, the gap Arbiter closes is typically ₹1,500–3,000 a month. You are already paying that. The only difference is whether you get it back.
Checkout opens in a few days. Email us and we'll send your copy, and the launch price, the moment it does.