CardCue Pro is an iPhone and Apple Watch app that scans your gift cards, store credit, loyalty punch cards and memberships, then reminds you when you are near a store where that money is waiting. This page is the technical backgrounder: what the app actually does, with the real numbers. Every figure here is read from the shipping source.
43% of Americans hold at least one unused gift card, gift voucher or store credit, worth $244 per person on average. In total that is about $27 billion sitting unspent. Bankrate, 2024
The money is not lost. It is just never in your hand at the moment you are standing at the register, which is the only moment it is worth anything.
The interesting engineering is in what does not fire. One component, the NotificationConductor, decides every alert, so the phone, watch, widgets and Live Activity cannot each independently decide to interrupt you.
| Same card, any alert type | at most once per 30 minutes |
| Hard ceiling per card | 3 interrupting banners per 24 hours |
| Multi-store rollups | one per hour |
| Pre-arrival nudges | one per 15 minutes |
| After a Watch buzz | the phone stays silent for 60 seconds |
| Ignore a card 3 times in 30 days | it goes quiet; one tap in Settings brings it back |
The cap counts interruptions only. Widget refreshes, Live Activity updates and silent watch updates are ambient and deliberately excluded. And the cap is per card: a wallet with ten cards can produce more than three alerts in a day.
A card's reminder radius is tuned to the kind of place you live: 100m in a city, 300m in a suburb, 600m in the country. Before a chirp the app waits 0 seconds in a city, 15 in a suburb and 30 in the country, then checks your speed again when the wait ends, so passing traffic does not trigger it. Quiet hours are a separate setting, on by default from 21:00 to 08:00.
To pick a profile, the app rounds your coordinate to a 1km grid square on the device, before any network call, and asks Claude Haiku what kind of area that square is. The answer is cached for 90 days. The server never receives a finer coordinate than that square, and never a name, an account, or a card.
A trajectory predictor can fire slightly early: if a store sits within 35 degrees of your heading and you are 30 seconds to 4 minutes out, the nudge arrives before you reach the fence. iOS allows an app 20 live geofences, so CardCue Pro keeps the nearest 20 armed and re-picks them as you move.
Before your first scan, CardCue Pro asks a direct question with two buttons: use the cloud AI, or scan on this iPhone only. No card photo can leave the device until you answer. Cloud is the recommended choice and you can switch either way later in Settings.
With the cloud read on, the card image goes to Anthropic's Claude through CardCue Pro's own server, which adds the API key and forwards it. That server stores nothing and logs no request bodies. The request carries no name, email, account, or device identifier. Anthropic may retain the image for up to 30 days; there is no zero-retention agreement, and the app says so on the consent screen itself. With on-device only, every scan stays on the phone and uses Vision alone.
| Card number and barcode | encrypted on the device before sync; the key lives in your iCloud Keychain and never reaches us |
| PIN | Keychain only, never synced |
| Card photos | never stored in the cloud and never synced; during a scan the photo goes to the AI reader unless Scan on-device only is on |
| Other fields | name, balance, notes and pinned coordinates sync in cleartext, protected by row-level security |
| Analytics | one SDK, PostHog, off by default, anonymous when on. No IDFA, no tracking prompt, no data sold |
An optional Face ID lock, off by default, locks the whole app and puts the full card number and PIN behind a Face ID reveal. The scannable barcode itself always shows instantly, no prompt between the tap and the cashier.
Four surfaces ship: the iPhone banner, the Apple Watch haptic, the Live Activity (which is what renders in the Dynamic Island), and the widget. A CarPlay surface is written but not shipping. All four read one shared snapshot, which is why they agree with each other.
| Platform | iPhone and Apple Watch, iOS 18.6+ |
| Free | the whole app, capped at 3 active cards |
| Pro | unlimited cards, sync across devices, restore onto a new device, Family Sharing |
| Price | $4.99/mo, $34.99/yr with a 7-day trial, or $79.99 once |
| Card types | gift, loyalty, punch pass, prepaid, membership |
| Ways to add a card | camera, photo, voice, typing, and opening an Apple Wallet pass (.pkpass) |
| Merchant database | 408 curated brands with category and colour; balance-check link or phone where the brand publishes one |
| Languages | 8 |
| Also ships | widgets, Year in Review |
| Being verified | Add to Apple Wallet export (needs an account); not listed as available until it is confirmed on the current App Store build |
| Built but off | Apple Intelligence on-device card scanning, CarPlay, the Share from Mail extension |
Share from Mail is built and in test; it is not in the App Store app yet. As built, sharing a gift-card email from Mail to CardCue Pro parses brand, number, PIN, balance and expiration with regular expressions. It carries no API key, and it makes no network call of any kind. Until it ships, add an emailed card by scanning it, typing it in, dictating it, or opening a .pkpass file.
Pika Product Lab LLC, Utah. Founder Christian Sorensen. Launched August 2026. The mascot is Cue, a pika, because pikas call out to each other when something matters.