CreditCadence

A use-it-or-lose-it statement-credit tracker for OfferStack — for every premium card in your wallet, CreditCadence maps each recurring credit to its real reset clock (monthly, quarterly, semi-annual, annual), tracks which ones you've already burned this cycle, and tells you exactly how many dollars are about to expire this week before they vanish.

Problem

The refreshed $895 Amex Platinum, the $795 Sapphire Reserve, and the new "coupon-book" cards now bundle $3,500+ in statement credits across a dozen different reset cadences — $25 monthly digital entertainment, $100 quarterly Resy, $300 semi-annual hotel — and the average Platinum holder leaves $300+ unused every year simply because nothing tells them what's left and when each clock resets. On June 2, 2026 even the enthusiast blogs were warning of a "triple threat" of credits expiring at the end of the month, the quarter, and the half-year all at once. OfferStack's Wallet already knows which cards you hold, but it renders each card's credits as a flat text blob (the card_credits table) with no cadence, no used/unused state, and no deadline.

Target user

The Active Optimizer persona from STRATEGY.md §2 — the power user holding 5–15 premium cards, several thousand dollars in annual fees, every card its own coupon book. Job-to-be-done: one screen that says "you have $X in credits resetting in the next 7 days — here's exactly what to burn first," without rebuilding a 12-tab spreadsheet by hand. Secondary user is the Aspiring Optimizer with a single Platinum, overwhelmed by the coupon-book complexity, who needs guardrails so an $895 fee isn't quietly wasted in its first year.

MVP scope

• A /tools/credit-cadence page plus a "Credits" tab on each card in /wallet (LIF-023), listing every recurring credit with its cadence, dollar value, enrollment requirement, and next reset date.
• Extend the existing card_credits table from (card_id, credit_description) to a structured card_credit_benefits shape — {card_id, label, value, cadence, reset_anchor, requires_enrollment} — seeded from a repo-checked data/card_credits.json rule-pack so RA can edit policy without a code deploy.
• A per-user user_credit_redemptions table (RLS owner-only, same plumbing as LIF-014/015) recording which credit was marked used in which period, with a one-tap "mark used" toggle per credit per cycle.
• A cadence engine that computes, for each unredeemed credit, the exact reset/expiry date and groups them into "expiring ≤7 days / ≤30 days / this quarter" buckets — fed into Next Best Actions (LIF-031) as a new input.
• A "Show math" panel mirroring LIF-035: total annual credit value on a card minus realized redemptions = net annual fee actually paid, so keep/close decisions sit on real usage rather than the sticker fee.
• Free tier: single-card public credit calendar (no auth, no marked-used state) as the SEO hook. Pro: wallet-wide tracking, marked-used persistence, and the "expiring this week" email/push digest reusing the LIF-055 reminder pipeline.

Monetization

none (internal tool) — feeds the existing OfferStack freemium model. The public single-card "what credits does this card have and when does each one reset" calculator is the free SEO hook (keyword cluster: "amex platinum credits 2026 reset schedule", "sapphire reserve credit tracker", "what credits expire december 31"). Wallet-wide marked-used tracking, the cross-card "expiring this week" dashboard, and the proactive email/push expiry digest sit behind the existing $5–8/mo Pro tier described in STRATEGY.md §5. One recovered $300 unused-credit year pays for roughly four years of Pro — a concrete upsell story for the Active Optimizer.

Why now

The 2025–2026 premium-card refreshes pushed the "extreme couponing" backlash mainstream: The Points Guy ran a piece on premium cards now demanding an extreme-couponing mindset, Frequent Miler shipped a "Coupon Book Tracker 2.0" adding the new Amex benefits and Citi Strata Elite, and on June 2, 2026 Eye of the Flyer flagged a "triple threat" of month-, quarter-, and half-year credits expiring at the same moment. The pain is measurable value leakage — $300+ per cardholder per year — which is exactly the "tracks in-flight actions and deadlines to prevent value leakage" purpose in PROJECT_REQUIREMENTS.md §1. It slots cleanly into Phase 2 (started 2026-05-11): /wallet (LIF-023) is live and Next Best Actions (LIF-031) is in-flight, so a user_credit_redemptions table drops in next to them on the same LIF-014/015 Supabase + TanStack Query plumbing rather than as net-new infrastructure.

Risks & open questions

• Demand-side: free trackers already exist (Frequent Miler, Travel on Points spreadsheets, MaxRewards). Does an OfferStack-native, wallet-integrated version convert at the 3–5% Pro rate STRATEGY.md §6.6 targets, or do power users stay on their own spreadsheets? Validate with a landing-page test before scoping the redemption table.
• Build-side: reset rules are messy — some credits reset on the calendar year, some on the cardmember anniversary, some require a once-per-year enrollment click. The rule-pack must encode reset_anchor per credit or the expiry math is silently wrong and the trust-first positioning in STRATEGY.md §6.3 breaks.
• Data freshness: issuers add and cut credits mid-year (the 2025 Platinum refresh did exactly this). data/card_credits.json needs RA ownership and a refresh cadence — most naturally a monthly Claude-drafted PR mirroring the LIF-047 CPP-update pipeline.
• Enrollment gap: knowing a credit exists is not the same as having enrolled in it. MVP can flag requires_enrollment but cannot verify the user actually clicked enroll inside the issuer app — it must never imply a credit is active when it isn't.
• Self-reported state: without bank-transaction integration (explicitly out of scope per PROJECT_REQUIREMENTS.md §13), "mark used" relies on the user's honesty. Acceptable for v1, but the dashboard must not overclaim precision it doesn't have.

Next step

Promote to a weekly prototype — build /tools/credit-cadence as a free-tier single-card public credit-reset calendar (read-only card_credit_benefits seeded from one month of data for the top five premium cards, no auth, no marked-used persistence) and validate the SEO + Reddit-sharing hook before scoping the per-user redemption table and the expiry digest as separate LIF-### items.

Sources

• https://eyeoftheflyer.com/2026/06/02/statement-credits-expiring-end-of-month-quarter-half-year/ — June 2, 2026 "triple threat" of month/quarter/half-year credits expiring simultaneously; the timeliest anchor for the cadence-aware design
• https://thepointsguy.com/news/premium-cards-now-too-complicated/ — TPG on premium cards now requiring an "extreme couponing" mindset; frames the mainstream pain this card addresses
• https://frequentmiler.com/coupon-book-tracker-1-0/ — Frequent Miler "Coupon Book Tracker 2.0" (added new Amex benefits, Citi Strata Elite); confirms live demand and the competitive baseline to beat
• https://travel-on-points.com/amex-platinum-credit-tracker/ — Amex Platinum credit tracker; per-credit cadence/value baseline for the data/card_credits.json rule-pack
• https://upgradedpoints.com/credit-cards/claim-missing-amex-statement-credits/ — confirms the "$300+ left unused per cardholder per year" leakage and the once-per-year enrollment requirement informing the requires_enrollment flag
• https://www.doctorofcredit.com/best-current-credit-card-sign-bonuses/ — DoC best current bonuses for June 2026 (e.g. CSR 150k); confirms the elevated premium-card landscape driving coupon-book proliferation
• D:/AI_Agents/Repo/Mikes_Repos/life-hacker/docs/STRATEGY.md — OfferStack personas (§2 Active / Aspiring Optimizer), freemium monetization (§5), trust-first positioning (§6.3)
• D:/AI_Agents/Repo/Mikes_Repos/life-hacker/docs/PROJECT_REQUIREMENTS.md — §1 value-leakage purpose, §4.5 Wallet, §4.10 monetization, §6.2 card_credits schema this idea extends, §13 out-of-scope (no bank-API integration)
• D:/AI_Agents/Repo/Mikes_Repos/life-hacker/docs/EXECUTION_BACKLOG.md — confirmed no open LIF-### item covers statement-credit redemption tracking; integration points are LIF-014/015 (Supabase + TanStack Query), LIF-023 (/wallet), LIF-031 (Next Best Actions), LIF-035 (calculator audit detail), LIF-055 (reminder email pipeline)