The Core Rule
Every factual claim on StackEasy must trace back to a primary source: an issuer's published terms, a federal data series, or a dataset we compiled ourselves and can show you. When a claim cannot be verified against one of those, it gets cut. The full list of sources we rely on is on the Data Sources page.
How We Verify Card Facts
Annual fees, rewards rates, and welcome offers come from the issuer's own website and cardmember agreements, not from secondhand roundups. Because issuers reprice cards without warning, we also maintain a verified fact registry for the most frequently covered cards, and an automated checker cross-references fee statements in our published articles against that registry. When it flags a mismatch, a human reviews the issuer's current terms and corrects the article.
When an issuer announces a major product change, such as the September 2025 American Express Platinum refresh, we sweep every article that references the card and update each one against the issuer's published announcement.
Where Our Statistics Come From
Market statistics on our credit card statistics page pull directly from Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) series covering average credit card APR, delinquency rates, charge-off rates, and revolving consumer credit outstanding. The page refreshes from the source data monthly, and each figure links to the FRED series it came from so you can check it yourself.
The Bureau Pull Database
Our bureau pull database tracks which credit bureau each major issuer tends to pull, by state. It is compiled from publicly posted application reports in communities like Doctor of Credit and the MyFICO forums, covering 9 major issuers across all 50 states. Two honest caveats: this data is crowdsourced, and issuers change pull behavior without notice. Treat it as the best available signal, not a guarantee. The raw data is available as a free JSON file and is free to cite with attribution.
How the Free Tools Calculate
Our calculators implement the standard, published formulas for what they measure: credit utilization is reported balances divided by credit limits, annual fee break-even compares the fee against the credits and rewards you actually use, and cents per point divides the cash value of a redemption by the points spent. No account is required to use any of them.
Quality Checks Before Publishing
Every article passes an automated quality gate before it goes live. The gate runs dozens of checks covering structure, sourcing, metadata, and consistency with the verified card fact registry. Articles that fail are blocked from publishing until a human fixes the problem. This system exists because credit is a topic where a wrong number costs readers real money.
Where This Can Fall Short
Issuer terms change between our review sweeps, crowdsourced data lags reality, and federal series publish on a delay. If you are about to apply for a card, confirm the current rates, fees, and offer on the issuer's site first. If you find a number on StackEasy that does not match the issuer's published terms, email hello@stackeasy.ai and we will verify and correct it. Our corrections policy covers how that works.
Related Policies
Read the Editorial Policy for who writes StackEasy content and how corrections work, Data Sources for the full list of sources behind our numbers, and How We Make Money for our revenue disclosure.