Home › Guides

How Beni's card guides are made

This page is the long version of the three-line note at the bottom of each guide. It says where the numbers come from, what the model leaves out, what was corrected by hand and why, and what changed when.

Where the numbers come from

Every rate, gap, wallet total, break-even and forex figure in these guides is computed by the same engine that powers the Beni app, run read-only over its India card data, except where a guide says its figures are quoted from an issuer's own document. The data covers 23 Indian cards — a subset of the market, not all of it. Every India card was last checked between 2026-07-21 and 2026-08-16. Four cards cannot be checked automatically by the refresh process — SBI SimplyCLICK, IRCTC SBI Card, IDFC FIRST WOW and Scapia Federal Bank — and carry a dagger mark wherever they appear in a table.

No figure is typed by hand; if a number cannot be produced by the engine or quoted from an issuer document, it does not appear. Brand-locked rates — a 5% that applies at one named shop — are applied only at that shop. Annual caps are applied where the issuer documents one. Where an issuer states that a card earns nothing on fuel, that is applied as a zero. Points cards are valued at one rupee per point. Rates are estimates compiled from public issuer information and they change, sometimes without notice.

What the model cannot see

The engine has one row per spending category and cannot tell an online payment from an in-person one. That matters for SBI Cashback, whose 5% turns on the channel, and it is why the which-card guide flags the rows it affects.
Exclusions beyond fuel — rent, utilities, insurance, education, wallet loads and the like — are not modelled, because the data has no categories for them.
Fee waivers above a spending threshold are recorded for one card only, so wallet and net-after-fee figures charge every fee in full. The annual-fee guide quotes the thresholds the issuers publish instead.
Combined ceilings across a card's buckets are not modelled.
Millennia's ten-brand list and SBI's online rule are handled by the merchant tables, not by the category totals — see the Millennia vs SBI Cashback comparison.

Corrections applied to the data before computing

Beni's card data records no fuel exclusion for Axis Magnus, Axis ACE, HSBC Live+, HDFC Regalia Gold or Scapia Federal Bank. Each issuer's own document says those cards earn nothing on fuel, so for the guides those five inputs are corrected before the engine runs — an input is corrected, never an output. The app's data is being updated to match; so on those five cards the app may still credit petrol until its data is updated. The issuers' words:

Axis Magnus — Axis excludes "Gold & Jewellery, Fuel, Cash advances and Repayments" from earning.
Axis ACE — "Cashback shall not be eligible on fuel spends, EMI transactions".
HDFC Regalia Gold — "Reward points will not be accrued for fuel transactions".
HSBC Live+ — HSBC's own worked example prices a fuel purchase at nothing: "Fuel INR 500 0% INR 0".
Scapia Federal Bank (whose rewards are travel coins, not cash) — Federal Bank's cardholder agreement says the same, we believe, but its server blocks automated re-fetching, so that one rests on our own reading.

Documents that could not be re-fetched

Federal Bank's server refuses automated fetches of the Scapia terms, so the Scapia fuel exclusion rests on a human reading rather than a machine check.
SBI's product pages come back as a script shell with no readable text to an automated fetch, so waiver and fee facts for SBI Prime, SBI SimplyCLICK, IRCTC SBI Card and SBI Cashback come from SBI's PDF terms documents where those exist, and are otherwise marked unknown.

How a page is checked before it goes live

Before publish, issuer quotes are fetched again from the issuer's document and matched; a quote that fails to re-fetch is left out of the evidence. A reviewer with no part in writing a page then reads it against a fixed bar — no false statement, each number traceable, each quote re-fetchable, each decision-changing caveat disclosed once — and a page that fails that bar stays unpublished.

Change log

2026-09-16 — Added a guide on paying by RuPay credit card on UPI. Its rules are quoted from five banks' own documents, a Canara Bank merchant notice and the Finance Ministry's press release, because our card data holds only two RuPay cards. The one computed part is the merchant-fee example, worked out from the published rates.
2026-09-13 — Added a guide on HDFC cards used abroad. Its markups are read from HDFC's own terms document rather than from our card data, and only the tax and rupee arithmetic is computed. That document puts Tata Neu Infinity HDFC Bank at 2%, while Beni's card data uses 3.5% for that card. The international charges guide still uses 3.5% for it and says HDFC's own pages disagree, which we believe is the fair reading until HDFC settles it.
2026-09-07 — Added a guide on why cashback is sometimes not credited. It appears to be the first guide here whose answer does not come from our card data: our data records only fuel exclusions, so the six reasons are carried by quotes from the issuers' own terms documents, each one fetched and checked, plus cap counts from our own data.
2026-08-25 — Added a guide on international transaction fees. Its cost column is each card's published markup plus 18% GST on that markup, computed from the same engine and the same 23-card dataset as every other guide. One rounding correction went with it: the cost per ₹1,00,000 is now computed from the unrounded markup, so the three cards at 1.99% read ₹2,348.
2026-08-17 — All four guides rewritten to lead with the answer, with the method moved to this page.
2026-08-16 — Fuel exclusions added for eleven cards from the issuers' own terms; the "best card for petrol" row was removed from the which-card guide because no card in our data earns more than a 1% base rate there. Fee waivers quoted from issuer pages on the annual-fee guide.
2026-08-09 — First three India guides published.

No affiliate links — Beni earns nothing whichever card you use. Beni is not a bank, takes no payment, and never asks for card numbers. Beni asks which cards you own — names only, never card numbers — and tells you which one to use, purchase by purchase.