CreditMate does more than record debt: it helps you spend well. Which card for this purchase, how far you are from an annual-fee waiver, and which offers are still valid. Every suggestion states its reasons and conditions.
Which card to use
When you are about to buy something, the app compares your cards on four factors:
- the cashback or points offer of each card for that kind of spending;
- the cashback cap per group, the maximum per period the bank allows;
- the merchant category code (MCC) of the merchant;
- the remaining available limit.
A conditional offer is labelled as conditional, for example one that applies only above a spending threshold or for online payments. The app does not present a conditional offer as a guaranteed cashback rate.
Categories and MCC
Spending is categorized by the MCC taken from statements, and the app remembers the MCC for each merchant. A verified MCC is kept apart from a guessed one. If a merchant's MCC is unclear, the suggestion says so instead of guessing and presenting a firm conclusion. The Insights screen summarizes spending trends and buying habits by category.
Annual fees
Many cards waive next year's annual fee if you spend enough during the previous year. CreditMate lets you declare that target and tracks it: how much you have spent, how much is missing and when the deadline is. As a hypothetical example, a card requires 50,000,000 VND of spending in a year; once you have spent 32,000,000 VND, the app shows 18,000,000 VND still missing and the days left. From there you decide whether to concentrate spending on that card.
The offers library for 27 banks
The assistant and the suggestions search a knowledge library bundled inside the app, covering card eligibility, fee schedules and offers from 27 banks. Three points matter:
- Date-aware validity. Each card-opening offer has a validity period. An offer that has expired as of today is dropped from results; one with no known end date is flagged "validity unknown" and is never treated as valid forever.
- Unverified. Fee and offer data carries a source and an access date (the current data was accessed on Oct 12, 2026) but is marked unverified. CreditMate does not claim it was confirmed by the bank. Check with the bank before deciding to open a card.
- Freshness. The assistant states when the offer data was last updated and warns when it is more than 45 days old.
The weekly update process
Card-opening offers change weekly while the app follows a release cycle. To keep content from going stale, the project has a controlled update process:
- A tool detects changes on promotion pages and program deadlines, and selects only the banks that show a change or are close to expiry for research.
- New content is drafted on a separate branch using only the bank's official sources, with the source link and validity dates.
- A reviewer opens each source and checks every figure and date before merging. No step automatically pushes content to users.
- Approved content ships with the next app release. The app has no network code for downloading offers and sends none of your data anywhere.
This way offers are refreshed regularly while a person remains accountable for each figure.