Health, home and travel decision
Point.me
A small technical team can build a useful limited award-search and alert service, but reproducing point.me's broad program coverage, real-time comprehensive search, and concierge/UX polish would take significant sustained effort and data work — use a DIY limited-scope replacement unless you need full coverage and concierge services.
Visit website↗No open-source build does this yet
Nothing published replaces this one, so a replacement starts from an empty file. Here is what it would have to cover.
What a replacement has to do
- Search award availability across programs, compare cash vs points vs transfer options, show booking/transfer instructions, track user points balances and alerts.
What it still won’t have
- Coverage of 150+ cards, airlines, and loyalty programs
- Real-time, wide-coverage award search across many programs
- Polished step-by-step booking guidance and concierge integration
- Email/route alert infrastructure at scale and 365-day calendar searches
What remains hard
- Product polish and ongoing maintenance
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 6 seats.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a minimal award-flight search web app in Node.js + PostgreSQL + React that searches award availability for a small set of major programs (start with United, American, Delta, and Avios), compares cash vs points (cents-per-point), shows templated transfer & booking instructions per program, and supports user sign-up and route-specific email alerts. In scope: scraper or API adapters for the chosen programs, normalization layer, result ranking, transfer recommendation logic, per-program booking instructions, simple UI with search and results, alert scheduler (cron job), and email delivery via SendGrid. Out of scope: full coverage of 150+ programs, concierge paid booking service, and automated booking. Include error handling, retries for scraping/API calls, unit tests for normalization and pricing logic, and end-to-end tests for the alert flow.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- 2 cited sources+1
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- 3/3 assessment runs agreed+4
- Evidence score60
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time — so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 2
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productpoint.me (home)
- official pricingpoint.me pricing and services
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
