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Inspiration

The average person carries about ~3.7 credit cards, yet nearly 70% of cardholders leave rewards unused, resulting in over $10 billion in unclaimed cashback, points, and miles every year (LendingTree 2024, U.S. Federal Reserve 2025, & Experian 2025). Managing category bonuses, rotating offers, and promotions across credit card portfolios are confusing and time-consuming. In other words, if a user is not up-to-date on offers, they are losing out on rewards.

Tired of watching rewards go to waste, we became the farmers your wallet deserves, building CashCow, a simple, automatic, real-time solution that helps users "milk their credit cards" for maximum value effortlessly.

Milking Your Rewards

CashCow is a Chrome extension that helps you get the biggest bang for your buck. When a user shops online, CashCow detects the merchant, evaluates which cards you currently own, along with current reward promotions, and recommends the card that will earn you rewards. The user can input into the settings which type of reward they value most: cashback, travel (in miles), or flex. CashCow will then use this preference to better recommend a card to use out of the ones you already have.

How We Built The Cow

We built CashCow with a robust data pipeline that connects merchant information to card recommendations. The pipeline begins with the URL detected by the browser extension, from which we extract the merchant name using urlparse. An agent from the fetch.ai uagent library then classifies the purchase category (for example, Southwest → Travel, Amazon → E-Commerce). Once categorized, this data is passed through BrightData via MCP, which uses an LLM to summarize and analyze credit card rewards for that merchant category. We focused on the top 13 credit cards (based on 2024 Forbes rankings) to keep the system efficient and relevant. A second uagent then considers all this input - user preferences (cashback, miles, or flexible rewards), the merchant category, and the BrightData insights - to determine the optimal card recommendation in real time.

On the frontend, we focused on making the extension simple, fast, and user-centered. The interface was first designed in Figma to structure layouts and visual flow. We then built it using HTML and CSS for core structure and styling, TailwindCSS to maintain consistent design patterns, JavaScript and TypeScript to manage behavior and data, and React to create reusable interface components. The extension provides a small panel that the user can open while shopping, showing real-time card recommendations without interrupting the checkout process. The interface is clean, easy to understand, and responsive across different merchant websites, allowing users to quickly see which card benefits them the most and by how much.

Challenges We Ran Into

One major challenge was working with tools and frameworks that were new to us. Even though sponsor engineers were available to help, the variety of APIs and platforms provided was a bit overwhelming at first. We had to quickly research capabilities, choose the right products, and integrate them into our existing architecture. The example implementations and starter guides from sponsors were extremely helpful, and we spent a lot of time studying those to get our extension working intelligently.

Another challenge was merging all of our working parts together. Since we were excited to use multiple tools, we had to coordinate different backend components while also building a clean and reliable UI/UX for the browser extension. Balancing integration work with frontend polish took time, but it ultimately strengthened our understanding of how these full-stack systems connect end to end.

Accomplishments We Are Proud Of

We are proud that we built a tool for improving financial literacy and rewards optimization that we would use ourselves. CashCow delivers real-time card recommendations with very little effort from the user. A user would simply open the extension during checkout to see which card maximizes rewards, saving money with ease at their fingertips. Beyond the technical achievements, we are especially proud of how our team came together. Despite being complete strangers at the start having connected via Slack, we quickly learned each other’s strengths and collaborated effectively under limited constraints. Our team included three first-time hackers and one experienced hacker, with members also representing a variety of majors and institutions. Even with such diverse backgrounds and levels of experience, we were able to work together seamlessly to bring our project to life!

What's Next for CashCow

Looking ahead, we plan to make CashCow the go-to tool for maximizing rewards across all your cards. This includes a universal payment interface that lets users pay anywhere and automatically reroutes the transaction to the card with the best reward offer. We also aim to expand mobile access beyond the Chrome browser extension, so users can optimize rewards in-store or on any device. In this mobile access, we'd also like to implement a notification system that alerts the user when their earned rewards will expire soon. A personal insights dashboard would provide a clear view of savings and missed reward opportunities, helping users understand and improve their earning potential. We would also want to add credit limits and how much credit utilization the user is at so they can consider this before they actually make the purchase. Additionally, we would love to partner with card issuers, like Visa, and negotiate terms of getting commission from purchases made with our product.