Why I keep building these comparison notes outside the main site

I run a few public research notes on crypto cards in addition to Sweepbase. People sometimes ask why I do not just put everything on the main site. The honest answer is that the side notes are where I test angles before they earn their way into the catalog.

The main site has to stay legible. Every page is rated, scored, and sortable, which means I cannot publish an angle there until I have run the math across all 139 cards. The notes are where I write up a single observation, link to the source data, and see if anyone pushes back.

What lives where

The longer essays go on Substack. The most recent one explained why most cashback claims do not survive a careful read of the tier requirements: Crypto card cashback is mostly fake. The technical writeup of why I built the data layer on a CSV file rather than a database is on Dev.to: My Next.js 15 aggregator runs on a CSV file instead of a database.

The shorter notes go on Telegraph. They are anonymous and that lets me write more directly about issuer fee schedules without worrying that the marketing team is reading. The most recent one walks through how cashback rates can mislead even when the percentage in the headline is real: When crypto card cashback rates are misleading.

Why a hub page makes sense

I finally indexed all of this writing in one place at sweepbase.net/press. If you want the trail of where the comparison data comes from, what I have written about it, and which datasets are open, that page is the start.

The hub also helps me. It is easy to lose track of which post on which platform argued which point. Having one index lets me link back to a piece I wrote three weeks ago without searching for it.

What I would tell another small-site founder

Write the notes. Even if nobody reads them in the first month, you build a body of work that you can reference later. The compound effect is that an issuer or a journalist who finds one note follows it to the others, and eventually to the site. I have had three reviewer requests this month that started from a Substack link, not from a Google search.

The other reason is honest: writing in public makes me more careful about what I claim on the main site. If I argued in a note that a card has a hidden fee, I cannot quietly drop it from the catalog later. The notes hold me accountable in a way that internal docs do not.

Full database is at sweepbase.net/cards. The press hub with all the writing is at sweepbase.net/press.