Terms of Service

PointBagel is operated by Point Alchemy, LLC, an Arizona limited liability company doing business as PointBagel. Point Alchemy, LLC is the company you are contracting with, and where these terms say “we,” “us,” or “PointBagel,” they mean Point Alchemy, LLC. Our mailing address is 1820 E Ray Rd #3006, Chandler, AZ 85225.

1. Acceptance of Terms

By accessing or using PointBagel (“the Service”), you agree to be bound by these Terms of Service. If you do not agree, do not use the Service. We may update these terms at any time; continued use after changes constitutes acceptance.

2. Description of Service

PointBagel is a credit card points and miles portfolio management and optimization platform. The Service provides tools for tracking reward balances, analyzing transaction earning rates, comparing credit cards, and estimating point redemption values.

3. Disclaimer of Accuracy

Point valuations, cents-per-point (CPP) estimates, transfer ratios, earning rates, welcome offers, and card benefits displayed on the Service are based on our own research and analysis. They are estimates and are not guaranteed to be accurate, complete, or current.

Credit card issuers, airlines, and hotel programs may change their terms, rates, and partnerships at any time without notice. Always verify current terms directly with your card issuer or loyalty program before making transfer, redemption, or application decisions. PointBagel is not responsible for losses resulting from inaccurate or outdated information.

4. Account Registration

You must provide accurate, current information when creating an account. You are responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of your credentials and for all activity under your account. You must be at least 18 years old to use the Service.

5. Subscription and Billing

PointBagel offers free and paid subscription tiers. Paid subscriptions are billed through Stripe. The price of each plan, the billing interval, and what the plan includes are shown on the pricing page, and are shown to you again, with the renewal terms, before you subscribe.

Automatic renewal. Paid subscriptions renew automatically. When you subscribe you agree to the renewal terms shown to you at that moment: the recurring amount, how often it is charged, and that it repeats. You authorize us to charge the payment method on file that amount at that interval, and the subscription and the charges continue until you cancel. We do not start a paid subscription without your express agreement to those renewal terms.

How to cancel. You can cancel online at any time: sign in, open Settings, open the Subscription section, and choose Manage Billing, then Cancel subscription. You can also reply to any subscription email we send you, or write to [email protected], and we will cancel it for you. Cancelling stops the next charge. It does not cut your access off on the spot: you keep the plan through the end of the billing period you have already paid for. We do not require a phone call, a chat session, or a retention offer to cancel.

What we email you.When you subscribe we email you a record of the terms you agreed to, including the amount, the billing interval, the renewal date, and the cancellation instructions above. If your plan's billing period is a year or longer, we email you a reminder before each renewal stating the date and the amount that will be charged. If your plan renews more often than that, we email you a reminder at least once a year stating the amount, the interval, and how to cancel. If a subscription that has been running at no cost to you is about to start being charged, we email you before that first charge. These are service messages about your own subscription, so they are sent whether or not you receive any other email from us. You can also read your current terms, and ask us to email you another copy of them, in Settings under Subscription.

Records of these terms. When you agree to the renewal terms we record that agreement: the date, the exact wording you agreed to, and the version of these Terms then in force. We keep that record so that either of us can establish what was agreed. We also keep the record of each subscription notice we send you, which notice it was, when we sent it, and the address it went to, for at least four years, because consumer-protection claims can be brought years after the fact. Two of those records are kept longer than that: your purchase acknowledgment and the one-time restatement we send to subscribers who predate this system are each sent once for a whole subscription rather than once per billing period, so we keep them for as long as your subscription exists, and beyond. Separately, a short entry recording which notice was sent, for which billing period, and on what date, is kept indefinitely; it carries no name and no email address, and it is what lets us show years later that a notice was given at all. If you delete your account we remove your personal details from the consent record and the email address from those notice records, and keep the terms themselves. Our Data Retention Policy and Privacy Policy describe both in full.

Refunds. Refunds are described in Section 15.

Sales tax. Subscription fees displayed on the pricing page do not include applicable US state or local sales tax. Tax is calculated based on your billing address and added at checkout where required by law. The pre-tax subscription fee is the amount paid to PointBagel; any sales tax collected is remitted to the appropriate taxing authority.

Founding-member pricing. Founding-tier subscribers receive a permanent twenty percent (20%) discount relative to standard pricing for the same plan, applied for as long as the subscription remains active and in good standing. If subscription fees are adjusted in the future, founding-tier subscribers continue to receive the 20% discount applied to the adjusted standard rate (i.e., the discount percentage is preserved across any future pricing changes).

Price changes.Standard subscription fees may be modified with at least sixty (60) days' advance notice via email to your account address. Continued use of the Service after the notice period constitutes acceptance of the new fees. You may cancel before the new fees take effect to avoid the change. Founding-tier fees move in lockstep with the standard subscription fees, preserving the 20% founding discount described above; founding-tier subscribers will not have their discount percentage reduced unilaterally.

5a. Referral Program

We run a referral program. It is something we offer at our discretion, not part of what a subscription buys, and it may be changed, paused, ended, or made unavailable to an individual account at any time. What follows describes how the program works today.

Who can refer. Any account in good standing can request a referral link and share it. Suspended accounts cannot. Referring costs nothing and does not require a paid plan. The reward, though, is a credit against a subscription bill, so a referrer who does not have a recurring paid subscription - a free account, or an account whose access does not bill on a recurring basis - can refer people and have those referrals counted, but earns no credit from them.

What the person you refer gets. On a monthly plan, their first month is free. On an annual plan, they get twenty percent (20%) off the first year. Where founding pricing applies, the referral discount stacks on top of it for that first year rather than replacing it. The discount applies once per person, on their first paid subscription only, and it is applied automatically at checkout. If it cannot be applied because they are not eligible for it, their purchase still completes at the ordinary price. If the discount cannot be created at all, checkout stops and asks them to try again rather than charging them without it.

What you earn, and when it counts.A referral earns you one month of your own plan's value. The amount is calculated from the plan you are on at the moment the referral is credited and is fixed at that figure from then on, so a later plan change does not move it. It is delivered as a one-time credit applied against your next bill. It is not cash, it is not a payout, and it cannot be transferred.

A referral is credited only after the person you referred starts a paid subscription and is still an active paying subscriber thirty-five (35) days later. Cancelling and re-subscribing does not restart that period.

The holding period. A credited referral may be held for up to about ninety (90) days measured from the day the person you referred subscribed. It becomes payable only if, at the end of that period, they are still a paying subscriber, your own account is in good standing and has an active subscription for the credit to apply to, and nothing has been flagged on either account. If their payment is in the middle of a retry when that day arrives, we keep waiting rather than voiding.

When a reward is voided. While a reward is still held, we may void it, and pay nothing, if the subscription behind it is refunded, disputed or charged back, flagged for fraud by our payment processor, or cancelled or downgraded to a free plan. If a credit has already been applied to one of your bills and the subscription behind it is then refunded or disputed, we record the reversal for our own accounting; we do not claw back a credit that has already reduced an invoice.

No self-referral, and no gaming it. You cannot refer yourself. A referral is not credited if the two accounts share a payment method, if the referred address is a disposable or throwaway email address, or if that email address has already been referred - one referral per email address, across the whole program. We monitor referral activity for patterns that look like abuse, we may require additional card verification at checkout on referrals from high-volume referrers, and we may withhold or void rewards on an account we believe is being used to work the program rather than to recommend the product.

Limits. We limit how many unused referral credits can sit on an account at one time. That limit is currently twelve (12). A credit stops counting against the limit once a bill has consumed it, so the limit bounds what is waiting rather than what you can earn over time. A referral that qualifies while you are at the limit is recorded, but it earns no credit, and that outcome is final for that referral.

Changes.We may change the program's terms, the reward amounts, or the limits, and we may end the program, at any time. Changes apply going forward. A credit that has already been applied to a bill stays applied.

6. Financial Data (Plaid)

The Service uses Plaid to connect to your financial accounts. By linking an account, you authorize Plaid to access your credit card transaction data on your behalf and share it with PointBagel for the purposes described in our Privacy Policy. PointBagel stores this transaction data to provide optimization recommendations. You may disconnect linked accounts at any time through your settings, or revoke Plaid's access at any time via the Plaid Portal at my.plaid.com.

By connecting a financial account through Plaid, you also agree to Plaid's End User Privacy Policy. Your authorization remains valid for up to 12 months from your most recent authorization. Before the authorization expires, we will ask you to re-authorize the connection in order to keep syncing transactions. If you revoke access yourself, we stop accessing Plaid data and delete the transaction history and linked-card records for that connection within 60 seconds. If instead a still-authorized connection lapses without re-authorization, we do the same after a 30-day grace period. Both paths are described in our Data Retention Policy. (Pseudonymized detection-learning records are governed by our Privacy Policy and are removed on opt-out or account deletion.)

A tier downgrade or cancellation is handled differently from disconnecting, and does not immediately delete your data. If a downgrade leaves you over your new plan's connection limit, we stop syncing the connections beyond that limit and, on the free plan, release their Plaid access tokens to avoid unnecessary charges, but we keep your existing transaction history and derived data. Re-subscribe and reconnect within about two years to resume syncing and rebuild as much history as your bank shares. After a bank you disconnected this way has been disconnected for about two years, we save its value summary into your Lifetime Scorecard and permanently delete its raw imported transactions, after emailing you a reminder beforehand. See our Data Retention Policy for details.

Not a Consumer Report. PointBagel does not use Plaid data, in whole or in part, to make eligibility determinations for credit, insurance, employment, housing, or any other purpose that would cause the Service to be considered a “consumer report” under the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) or any similar state law. The Service provides rewards optimization informational tools only. You agree not to use the Service for any FCRA-covered purpose.

Aggregate Detection Improvement. You agree that PointBagel may analyze de-identified merchant labels and merchant categories from your transaction data, in aggregate with other users, to improve the accuracy of our automatic benefit-detection catalog (for example, learning that a particular merchant string corresponds to a known issuer statement credit). This analysis uses only merchant-string and category tokens; no user identifiers, account numbers, balances, or transaction amounts are included or exposed. The aggregated output improves detection accuracy for all users and is never shared or sold to third parties. See our Privacy Policy for the full description.

6a. Connecting an AI Assistant (Model Context Protocol)

The Service lets you connect a third-party AI assistant (for example Claude or ChatGPT) to your account using the Model Context Protocol. Connecting is optional. When you connect an assistant, you direct PointBagel to give that assistant read-only access to your own account data so it can answer your questions; the connection cannot write to your account, move points or money, or access any account other than your own. The AI assistant is operated by a third party and is governed by that party's own terms and privacy policy, not ours, and PointBagel is not responsible for how a connected assistant uses, stores, or retains data once it has read it. If you connect using a pasted access token, you are responsible for keeping that token confidential and for all activity conducted with it, as with any other account credential. You may review and disconnect any connected assistant at any time from Settings, and signing out of all devices revokes every connection. We may rate-limit, suspend, or revoke MCP connections to protect the Service.

7. Affiliate Links

Some credit card links on the Service may be affiliate links, meaning PointBagel may receive a commission if you apply for and are approved for a card through them. We will not have an affiliate relationship for every card. Affiliate relationships do not influence our recommendations, which are generated algorithmically based on your spending patterns and card benefits. For how we make money and how we mark affiliate links, see our Affiliate & Advertising Disclosure.

8. Not Financial Advice

The Service provides informational tools and estimates, not financial, investment, tax, or legal advice. Credit card applications affect your credit score. Consult a qualified financial professional before making financial decisions. PointBagel is not a financial advisor, credit counselor, or fiduciary.

9. Intellectual Property

All content, features, and functionality of the Service (including software, text, algorithms, and design) are owned by PointBagel and protected by copyright and other intellectual property laws. You may not copy, modify, distribute, or reverse-engineer any part of the Service.

10. Prohibited Conduct

You agree not to:

• Use the Service for any unlawful purpose
• Attempt to gain unauthorized access to the Service or its systems
• Scrape, crawl, or use automated tools to extract data from the Service
• Interfere with or disrupt the Service's infrastructure
• Share your account with third parties or create multiple accounts

10a. Data Extraction and AI Training Restrictions

The data, research, valuations, sweet spots, transfer ratios, welcome offer histories, and other content made available through the Service (the “Service Data”) are the proprietary work product of PointBagel. Without our prior written permission, you may not, and may not permit any third party (including any artificial intelligence system, agent, or automated tool acting on your behalf) to:

• Use the Service Data, in whole or in part, to train, fine-tune, evaluate, or otherwise develop any machine learning, large language model, or other artificial intelligence system or dataset
• Build, populate, or maintain any database, search index, recommendation engine, or derivative product using extracted Service Data
• Republish, redistribute, sell, license, or otherwise commercialize the Service Data, whether modified or in raw form
• Bypass, ignore, or circumvent the directives published in our robots.txtfile or in any noai, noimageai, or similar HTML metadata tags. Compliance with those directives is a contractual condition of using the Service

We reserve the right to suspend or terminate any account, revoke API credentials, and pursue all available legal remedies (including injunctive relief and damages) against any party engaged in the conduct prohibited by this section.

Authorized AI-assistant connections. Nothing in Sections 10 or 10a restricts an AI assistant that you have connected to your own account through an authorized Model Context Protocol (MCP) connection from reading Service Data made available to you for the sole purpose of answering your own questions about your own account. This permission is limited to read-only, personal use at your direction and does not permit you or the assistant to retain or store Service Data beyond the session, redistribute or resell it, use it to train or fine-tune a model, or build, populate, or maintain any database, index, recommendation engine, or competing product.

11. Limitation of Liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, PointBagel shall not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or any loss of profits or data, arising from your use of the Service. Our total liability for any claim shall not exceed the amount you paid for the Service in the 12 months preceding the claim.

12. Indemnification

You agree to indemnify and hold harmless PointBagel, its officers, and employees from any claims, damages, or expenses arising from your use of the Service or violation of these Terms.

13. Account Termination

You may delete your account at any time through settings. We may suspend or terminate your account for violation of these Terms. Upon termination, your data will be deleted in accordance with our Privacy Policy.

14. Disclaimer of Warranties

The Service is provided on an “as is” and “as available” basis. PointBagel makes no warranties, express or implied, including but not limited to warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, or non-infringement. We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or that any data will be accurate or complete.

15. Refund Policy

If you purchase a subscription and request a refund within 24 hours of your initial purchase, we will provide a full refund. After 24 hours, all subscription payments are non-refundable. You may cancel your subscription at any time through your account settings, and you will retain access through the end of your current billing period.

The paragraph above is about subscriptions. Founder office hours is a separate, one-time purchase, and it has its own refund and rescheduling terms, which are stated on the office hours page and apply to that purchase instead. In short: if you cancel, the session fee is not refunded, because the preparation and the written plan are work done either way; if we cancel, you get a full refund. You can reschedule once at no charge, and a second reschedule is a $100 fee.

16. Dispute Resolution and Arbitration

You and PointBagel agree that any dispute, claim, or controversy arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Service shall be resolved through binding individual arbitration, rather than in court, except that either party may seek injunctive or equitable relief in court for intellectual property disputes. Arbitration shall be administered under the rules of the American Arbitration Association and take place in Arizona. The arbitrator's decision shall be final and binding.

Class Action Waiver: You agree that any dispute resolution proceedings will be conducted only on an individual basis and not as part of a class, consolidated, or representative action. You waive any right to participate in a class action lawsuit or class-wide arbitration against PointBagel.

17. Force Majeure

PointBagel shall not be liable for any delay or failure in performance resulting from events beyond our reasonable control, including but not limited to natural disasters, internet outages, third-party service failures (including Plaid, Stripe, or hosting providers), government actions, or cyberattacks.

18. Changes to These Terms

We may update these Terms from time to time. We will notify you of material changes by posting the updated Terms on this page with a new effective date and, where appropriate, by email. Continued use of the Service after changes take effect constitutes acceptance of the updated Terms.

19. Governing Law

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Arizona, without regard to its conflict of law provisions. For disputes not subject to arbitration, any legal action shall be brought in the state or federal courts located in Arizona.

20. Contact

Questions about these Terms may be directed to [email protected].