How We Built a Canadian Credit Card Optimizer That Respects Annual Caps (the detail nobody gets right)

How We Built a Canadian Credit Card Optimizer That Respects Annual Caps (the detail nobody gets right) tags: webdev, startup, react, canada Here's a dirty secret about most credit card reward calculators: they lie. Not intentionally. They just don't model the complexity of real card T&Cs. And in Canada, that complexity is brutal. I'm building Rewardly — a credit card reward optimizer for Canadians. And the single hardest engineering problem we've faced isn't scraping data, isn't building a clean UI, isn't even getting our 410-card database to load fast. It's correctly modeling annual category caps . Let me show you why this is hard, how we got it wrong the first time, and what the actual solution looks like. The Problem: Annual Caps Are Complicated Every "premium" Canadian credit card has a variation of this structure: Earn 5x points on grocery purchases up to $500/month, then 1x. Sounds simple. But real cards look more like this (paraphrasing the Scotiabank Gold American Express): Ear