Building Rewardly: My First SaaS in Public

Building Rewardly: My First SaaS in Public I spent the last month building Rewardly , an AI-powered credit card rewards optimizer for Canada. This is my first "real" SaaS — not a side project I'll abandon in three weeks, not a portfolio piece. Something I'm actually trying to turn into a business. This is the story of how I got here, what I built, and what I learned along the way. The Problem I Didn't Know I Had The idea for Rewardly came from watching my girlfriend juggle four credit cards at the grocery store checkout. She wasn't choosing randomly. She knew one card gave 4% on groceries, another gave 3% at certain stores, and a third had some convoluted points system that was "technically better" if you redeemed through their portal during a full moon. I asked: "Is this actually worth it?" She showed me her spreadsheet. She'd been tracking cashback for six months. The difference between using the "right" card vs. just defaulting to one card was $450/year . That's when I realized: thi