I manually built a database of 3,500+ US credit cards — allcredit.cards is live

I manually built a database of 3,500+ US credit card issuers — allcredit.cards is live

Hey IH,

A few months ago I started a project that sounded simple on paper: build a searchable database comparing credit card offers — APR, annual fees, intro rates, rewards — across every US bank and credit union, not just the 10 big names everyone already knows about.

The problem: if you search "best credit card" online, you get the same 15-20 cards from Chase, Amex, Capital One, over and over. But there are 686 banks and nearly 3,000 credit unions in the US that issue their own cards, often with better rates or fee structures for local members — and basically zero good way to compare them side by side. Most of that data is buried in PDFs, JS-rendered rate tables, or scattered marketing pages.

What I did: started manually going through every institution's rate sheets and card catalogs — bank by bank, credit union by credit union, pulling out card name, category, annual fee, variable APR, intro APR, and the actual rewards/benefits. Turns out a lot of smaller banks reuse the same handful of card catalogs (Elan Financial Services, TCM Bank, applycommunitycard.com), which helped once I recognized the pattern — but a huge chunk still needed one-by-one digging.

Where it's at right now:

• All 686 banks: fully mapped

• Credit unions: working through them ranked by credit card loan volume — currently complete through rank ~1,484 of ~2,855 (just over half), adding more every week

• allcredit.cards is live — you can go check it out right now

Why I'm posting: would love feedback from this community —

• Would you actually use something like this to shop for a card, or does "best card" content already solve this for you?

• What would make this useful enough to bookmark — filtering by credit union membership eligibility? Location? Category (cashback vs travel vs business)?

• Anyone dealt with rate data going stale — how do you handle re-verification at this scale without it becoming a full-time job?

Site's up at allcredit.cards — happy to answer anything about the data-wrangling process too, it's been equal parts tedious and weirdly satisfying.