Why we named it min/Max

Every product name is a small argument about what the product is for, and min/Max has a more personal origin than most, since it started as a way of thinking about credit cards before it was ever a company. The term comes from role-playing games, where min-maxing means pushing the stats your character's class depends on as high as they'll go and putting almost nothing into the ones it doesn't [1]. A tank and a rogue are built from the same pool of points, and neither build is wrong, because each is optimized for a different job.

One pool of 20 points, two buildsAn illustration

Tank

• Strength
• Wisdom
• Luck
• Stealth

Rogue

• Strength
• Wisdom
• Luck
• Stealth

When I first got into credit cards, I thought of what I was doing as credit card gaming, which is a fairly literal way of saying I was min-maxing a system with rules, resources, and hidden mechanics. What struck me as I went deeper was that in a game you don't min-max in the abstract, you min-max for a class, whether that's a tank, a rogue, or an assassin, and it seemed strange that nobody talked about credit that way. A student, a business owner, and an entrepreneur all interact with money and credit in ways that are individual and specific to them, the same way a player wants a character with a build that plays a bigger part in the game, whether that means stealth, strength, wisdom, or luck. If that's true, then a single "best" card or a single "best" redemption is about as meaningful as a single best character build, which is to say it isn't.

It also turned out to be a habit of mine well beyond cards. Min-maxing became a popular term for a lot of things in life, and I realized I'd been trying to min-max most of mine, minimizing the effort I put in while maximizing the output I could provide. (That's my own loose stretch of the term, not its definition, which is about stats and not effort.) I took a particular liking to personal finance, financial literacy, and especially credit cards, and the version of the idea I settled on there was a rule I still use, "minimize spend, maximize rewards."

That's the thinking behind the name and behind the platform. We want the tool to help people build for the class they actually play, and to keep updating as that class changes, which is the same argument we make in our post on what a credit card point is worth.

Sources

1. Dictionary.com. n.d. "Min-max." Dictionary.com, LLC. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/min-max. Accessed September 29, 2026. ↩