How we rate

BlockColumn rates every platform it covers on a 0–10 scale built from public, weighted factors. A score here is not a gut feeling or a paid favour: it is arithmetic applied to evidence we can point to. This page explains where the numbers come from, what a score does and does not mean, and how we keep it honest. The exact factors and weights for each category are set out at the foot of this page.

Every number traces to a primary source

The facts in a review — a fee, a cashback rate, the countries a card ships to — come from the provider’s own documents: its fee schedule, its terms of service, its official help pages, and the filings of whichever regulator licenses it. We record the exact figure and the page it came from before it is allowed into a review. If a provider does not publish something, the review says “Not disclosed” rather than filling the gap with a guess or a number borrowed from a forum.

This is deliberately strict. It means our tables sometimes carry an honest blank where a rival site shows a confident figure. We would rather show you a blank we can defend than a number we cannot.

We rate cards. We do not test them.

One limit, stated plainly: we verify documents, we do not run the products. We have not opened accounts, funded them, or made live purchases with the cards reviewed here, so you will not find first-hand spending anecdotes, “in our testing” claims, or invented user experiences anywhere on this site. When we call a card rated, we mean its published terms were read closely and checked against the provider’s own sources on the date shown — not that a staffer carried it in their wallet.

Where lived experience matters, we cite it as what it is: attributed reports from named sources, never experience we are pretending to have. If that ever changes and we begin genuine first-hand testing, this page will say so, and tested claims will be labelled as tested.

How we keep scores current

Prices, rewards and country coverage move constantly, so a review is only as good as its last check. Every volatile figure carries a “last verified” date, and we re-check those figures on a set cadence rather than at random. When a value expires without being re-confirmed, it is pulled from display instead of shown as though it were still true. A stale number is treated as no number.

Independence and corrections

Scores are computed from the published factors and nothing else. Commercial relationships do not move them: we earn money from clearly labelled sponsorships and affiliate links, and those arrangements never adjust a grade, a rank, or whether a card is covered at all. The full detail sits on our affiliate and sponsored disclosure page, and the wider rules we work to are set out in our editorial policy.

If we get something wrong, tell us and we will fix it. A correction to a figure is made promptly, and its “last verified” date is reset so you can see the review was touched.

The factors behind a score

Every score is built from a small set of factors, each graded 0–10, then combined by weight into one overall figure. The factors and their weights are fixed for a category before any product is scored, so the same yardstick is applied to every card, and a high overall score is never a blanket recommendation: a card that wins on rewards can still lose on availability. The exact weighting for each category is listed below, generated directly from the configuration our scoring engine runs.

How the overall score is computed

Overall score = Σ(factor score × weight) ÷ Σ(weight), on a 0–10 scale, rounded to one decimal. Scores are set per our published factor definitions and re-verified on a regular cadence; the “last verified” date on every review shows when its data was last checked. Sponsorships and affiliate partnerships never influence scores or rankings.