I Built a Dashboard That Shows What Credit Cards Really Cost

TL;DR: I got tired of stitching together five bank apps, a spreadsheet, and Splitwise to understand my credit card spending. So I built a dashboard that does what none of them do: show you what your cards actually cost after credits, cashback, and shared expenses. It's free, connects through Plaid, and doesn't make money by recommending cards you don't need. Here's the story of why it exists and what it does.

The Spreadsheet That Started Everything

In 2022, I had five credit cards and a Google Sheet with 14 tabs.

Tab 1 was the master view -- a monthly summary of spending across all cards. Tabs 2 through 6 were card-specific breakdowns: Amex Platinum, Chase Sapphire Reserve, Amex Gold, Capital One Venture X, Citi Double Cash. Tabs 7 through 11 tracked credits and perks for each card. Tab 12 was the "true spend" calculator. Tab 13 reconciled Splitwise with my actual card charges. Tab 14 was the annual fee audit.

Every Sunday evening, I'd spend 30-45 minutes updating this spreadsheet. Logging into each bank app. Cross-referencing Splitwise. Checking which Amex credits had posted. Calculating my "real" spending after subtracting everything I'd gotten back.

My friends thought this was insane. My girlfriend thought this was insane. I thought this was insane. But every time I tried to stop, I'd look at my Amex statement and see "$14,800 in spending" and feel that familiar gut punch of guilt -- even though I knew roughly $1,400 of that had come back to me in credits I'd already used.

That $14,800 number is a lie. But it's the only number any banking app will show you. And if you carry premium credit cards, you're making financial decisions based on a number that's systematically wrong.

The Problem Nobody Solves

I tried everything before building my own tool. Here's what I found:

Mint (RIP): Showed all cards in one place. Couldn't subtract credits from spending. Couldn't handle Splitwise reconciliation. Shut down in 2024.

Monarch Money ($14.99/month): Beautiful, comprehensive budgeting. But it shows statement totals, not true spend. My Amex Platinum still looks like $14,800. And I'm paying $100-180/year for a tool that shows me the wrong number.

YNAB ($14.99/month): Changed my budgeting habits forever. But it's a budgeting methodology, not a card management tool. It has no concept of "this credit card gave you $200 back in Uber credits."

Chase app, Amex app, Capital One app: Each shows one issuer's cards. To see everything, I need three apps. None of them show me the net cost of my card after credits. None of them know about my Splitwise splits.

The core problem is this: credit card spending has two numbers that matter.

Statement spend -- what your bank says you spent
True spend -- what you actually paid, after subtracting every dollar of value you received back

Every finance tool shows you #1. Nobody shows you #2. And the gap between them can be 10-20% for anyone with premium cards.

The Aha Moment

It happened during a dinner with friends. Five of us at a Korean BBQ spot in Koreatown, bill came to $280. I put it on my Amex Gold (4x on dining, obviously). Everyone Venmo'd me their share. My actual cost: $56.

The next morning, I opened my Amex app. It showed a $280 dining charge. I opened Monarch, same thing -- $280 in dining this week. I opened my spreadsheet and manually subtracted the $224 my friends had paid me.

And I thought: why am I the one doing this math? I have Splitwise telling me exactly what my share is. I have Amex telling me exactly what credits they've given me. I have all the raw data. It's sitting in separate apps that refuse to talk to each other.

What if there was one dashboard that connected everything and just showed me the real number?

That's when the spreadsheet became a side project. And the side project became Prospify.

What the Dashboard Actually Does

I didn't set out to build a budgeting app. There are enough of those. I set out to build the thing I needed: a dashboard for people who carry multiple credit cards and want to know what they're actually paying.

True Spend Tracking

This is the core feature. Prospify connects to your cards through Plaid and automatically detects credits, cashback, and perks. It shows two numbers side by side: what your bank says you spent, and what you actually spent.

For my Amex Platinum last year:

Statement total: $14,800
After credits and cashback: $13,400
True cost: 9.5% less than what the statement shows

Across all five of my cards, the gap was $3,654. I was budgeting against a number that was almost $4,000 too high. For years.

Benefit Tracking

Every premium card comes with credits. Monthly Uber credits, dining credits, travel credits, streaming credits. Each with different amounts, different frequencies, different expiration rules.

Prospify knows which benefits your cards offer and automatically detects when you've used them. The dashboard shows green for used, red for expired, yellow for expiring soon. At a glance, you can see that you forgot your $15 Uber credit in March, or that your Saks credit expires in six days.

Last year, I left $680 in benefits on the table. With automated tracking, I would have caught most of those before they expired.

Splitwise Reconciliation

This one is personal. In my friend group, we split everything through Splitwise. I front a lot of group expenses on my cards (for the points). This means my credit card statements show thousands in spending that isn't actually mine -- it's money my friends owe me.

Prospify integrates with Splitwise and automatically adjusts your spending to reflect your actual share. That $280 Korean BBQ charge becomes $56 in my dashboard. The $2,400 Airbnb for a group trip becomes $480. My "total dining spending" reflects what I actually paid, not what I fronted.

This alone changed my understanding of my own finances. I thought I spent $18,000 on dining and entertainment last year. After Splitwise reconciliation, it was $7,200. The rest was money I fronted and got back.

Multi-Card Dashboard

Five cards. Five issuers. Five apps. One dashboard.

Prospify shows all your cards in one view with spending breakdowns, credit utilization, recent transactions, and payment due dates. The interface is clean -- dark mode, minimal, no ads, no "recommended cards" cluttering the sidebar.

I built this with Next.js and Plaid's API. Your bank credentials never touch our servers -- Plaid handles the secure connection directly. The data is encrypted at rest. There are no analytics trackers harvesting your spending patterns.

Annual Fee Audit

Each card gets a simple scorecard: benefits used, points earned, minus annual fee. Positive number means the card is earning its keep. Negative means you should consider downgrading.

My Venture X last year: $536 in credits and points earned, minus $395 annual fee = +$141 net value. Worth keeping. But barely. If I hadn't used the $300 travel credit, it would have been -$159, and I'd be looking at the no-fee Venture.

Why It's Free

The obvious question: how does a free app make money?

Right now, it doesn't. Prospify is in beta, and I'm funding it myself. When it does monetize, it won't be through affiliate commissions. This is a deliberate choice.

Here's why it matters: every major credit card recommendation site -- NerdWallet, The Points Guy, WalletHub, Credit Karma -- makes money when you apply for a card through their link. The commission is typically $50-200 per application. This means their "best credit card" rankings are influenced (sometimes heavily) by which issuers pay the most.

I don't want Prospify to recommend the Amex Platinum because Amex pays a $150 referral fee. I want Prospify to tell you whether the Amex Platinum is actually worth it for you, based on your spending patterns and benefit usage. Those are different things, and it's almost impossible to do both honestly.

The monetization will eventually come from premium features -- advanced analytics, tax preparation exports, family accounts. Not from steering you toward cards that benefit me instead of you.

The Tech, Briefly

For the Hacker News crowd who care about this: Prospify is built on Next.js with a Supabase backend. Bank connections go through Plaid, which means bank-grade encryption and no credential storage on our side. The frontend is server-rendered for speed. The whole stack is TypeScript.

I chose Plaid because it's what every serious fintech uses (Venmo, Robinhood, Coinbase). Your bank username and password go directly to Plaid through their secure widget -- they never pass through Prospify's servers. Plaid then gives us read-only access to transaction data. We can't move money, can't make purchases, can't do anything except read your transaction history.

Row-level security on the database means your data is isolated from every other user's data at the infrastructure level. It's not just application logic -- it's enforced by the database itself.

Who This Is For

Prospify isn't for everyone. If you have one credit card and a simple financial life, you don't need this. Your bank app is fine.

Prospify is for people who:

Carry 3+ credit cards and want to see them all in one place
Pay annual fees and want to know if their cards are actually worth it
Split expenses with friends and are tired of their "spending" being inflated by money they fronted
Want to know their true spend -- not the inflated number their bank shows
Care about unbiased information and don't want card recommendations driven by affiliate commissions
Are first-gen immigrants juggling cards across multiple issuers as they build US credit history

If that sounds like you -- and if you're in a WhatsApp group chat that also has an active Splitwise group -- you're probably the exact person I built this for.

Try It

Prospify is free during beta. No credit card required (ironic, I know). Connect your cards, see your true spend, check which benefits you're leaving on the table, and reconcile your Splitwise splits automatically.

It took me three years of spreadsheets to understand what my credit cards actually cost me. Prospify shows you in about 30 seconds.

Get started free at prospify.app

Questions about the tech stack, the data model, or why I made specific product decisions? I'm on Twitter/X and I love talking about this stuff.