I totally hear you! We looked at the comments here and are going to make a lot of the features on the product available without account creation! Appreciate the feedback

Be careful to not overfit to HN comments if they're not your target audience though! Sometimes the vibe is "I don't wanna pay for stuff and I can build that myself" and that probably isn't your target audience

My complaint isn't about having to pay, it's about not knowing upfront whether I will.

And that's totally valid, I agree 100%. Show me what I get and I'll happily pay

To be clear, it's totally fair to require account creation – data and customer relationships are currencies too, after all – in my view. (I might personally choose to not use it then, and that's just as fair.)

I'd just have liked to know about it before selecting a few of my cards, which took me a minute or so. That's too much time/effort to get nothing in return.

Thank you for the comment - based on your feedback we have enhanced a bit the experience for users without logging in.

Now on the landing page users are able to input cards to their liking and compare them at different vendors/categories to determine the best card without login.