About PointCents

PointCents started with a question that sounds simple until you try to answer it. You're holding 57,500 miles and looking at a flight that costs $1,043 in cash. Is spending the miles a good deal, or are you about to burn a year of spending on something you could have paid for?

The arithmetic takes ten seconds. The hard part is the second half of the question: good compared to what? Every answer Eric found online was confident, unsourced, and different from the last one, and most of them sat above an affiliate link for a credit card.

So he built the part that was missing. PointCents is a set of free, no-account tools that price a redemption to the cent, show every variable that went into it, and name the source of every figure they compare it against.

How it works

Every tool on PointCents is grounded in a documented, citable method — a published formula, an authoritative standard, or a well-established model. We don't approximate or invent numbers. If we can't cite a primary source for the logic, we don't publish the tool.

For PointCents, the arithmetic is the formula the award-travel community already uses — cash fare, minus any cash you paid at booking, divided by the points you spent — stated in full on every page that uses it. That part isn't controversial. You can redo it by hand, and we'd rather you did.

Why we won't tell you what a point is worth

The contested part is the comparison. Plenty of sites will tell you an American AAdvantage mile is worth some specific number of cents.

In July 2026, The Points Guy put it at 1.4¢. In June 2026, CardRatings put it at 1.7¢. That is a 21% disagreement about the same currency in the same season, from two outlets that both publish a methodology and are both worth reading.

Neither one is wrong. They're built differently. One takes the median of a documented sample of real bookings. One blends award data with editorial judgment about how a program actually behaves in practice. A third averages real bookings but never says how many. Those are three different questions, and they produce three different answers.

So PointCents doesn't pick one and call it the baseline. We show every published figure side by side, each labelled with who published it, when, and how they got there. Your redemption then reads as above every published baseline, inside the range, or below all of them.

Where the sources disagree, you see the disagreement. That is the product.

We also don't average them into one number. Blending a documented sample median with a partly-editorial estimate produces something tidy that looks more precise than anything underneath it. Where an answer depends on an assumption, we hand you the assumption as an input you can change instead of hiding it in the result.

Our commitments

• Free, no sign-up required. Every tool on this site is free to use with no account, subscription, or paywall.
• We show our work. Every tool explains its methodology, cites its sources, and surfaces assumptions — so you can verify the logic, not just trust the output.
• Honest about limitations.Where precision is limited or assumptions are required, we say so. Tools compute; they don't replace professional judgment.
• Kept current.Tools that use figures that can change over time carry a “last reviewed” date and are treated as an ongoing maintenance responsibility, not a one-time build.

Get in touch

Questions, corrections, or suggestions: hello@pointcents.com. Eric reads every message personally.