If you have been churning for any length of time, you know the pain. You opened a card three months ago with a $4,000 spending requirement. You were on track. Then life happened, and suddenly you are two weeks past the deadline with $600 left to go. The bonus is gone. That is real money lost because of a missed date on a spreadsheet you forgot to check.
This is the exact problem we built email alerts to solve. Churning Hub now sends you a heads-up before any important date arrives, so you can take action instead of scrambling after the fact.
What the Alerts Cover
There are four types of alerts, and you can turn each one on or off independently:
Requirements deadline approaching. This is the big one. When you add a bonus entry in Churning Hub, you can set a specific requirements deadline date. Maybe it is 90 days from account opening for a credit card, or 60 days for a bank bonus. Whatever the actual due date is, you enter it once, and the system tracks it for you. As that date approaches, you get an email with the entry name and how many days you have left.
Annual fee due dates. That $95 or $550 annual fee sneaks up on everyone. If you have an AF due date set on any card, you will get a reminder before it hits. This gives you time to decide whether to keep the card, downgrade, or cancel before the fee posts.
Ready to churn. When you close a card, Churning Hub tracks the date. Twelve months later, many issuers consider you eligible for a new sign-up bonus on that same product. This alert tells you when that window opens so you can start planning your next application.
Personal reminders. Every entry has an optional reminder date field. Use it for anything: a date to call the bank, a retention offer deadline, a date to check if a bonus posted. When that date approaches, you get the email.
Setting Your Lead Time
Different people want different amounts of advance notice. A weekend churner who checks their accounts every few days might only need three days of lead time. Someone juggling ten cards across two players might want 14 or even 30 days of warning.
You pick your lead time once in the alert settings panel: 1 day, 3 days, 7 days, 14 days, or 30 days. That applies to all four alert types. Seven days is the default, and for most people, that is the sweet spot. It is enough time to rearrange spending or make a phone call without being so far ahead that you forget again by the time the actual date arrives.
The Requirements Deadline Field
This deserves its own section because it is the feature people have asked about the most.
Before this update, the spending deadline was estimated at 90 days from your card's open date. That works for a lot of cards, but not all. Some cards give you four months. Bank bonuses might give you 60 days or 180 days. Amex sometimes gives you six months on higher-tier products.
Now, every entry has a dedicated "Requirements Deadline" date field. You enter the actual deadline from your offer terms, and that is the date the alert system uses. No guessing, no assumptions. If you leave it blank, the system still falls back to estimating 90 days from the open date for any entry marked "In Progress."
You can also set deadlines on individual requirements within an entry. If your bank bonus requires three debit purchases by April 1 and a direct deposit by May 15, you can set a bell icon on each requirement line with its own date. Those show up as color-coded badges right in the table: blue if the deadline is comfortable, yellow if it is soon, red if it is urgent.
How to Turn It On
Scroll down to the form area in Churning Hub (where you add or edit entries) and look for the "Email Alerts" panel. Click to expand it, flip the master toggle to on, and choose which alert types you want. Hit "Save Alert Preferences" and you are done.
Alerts go to the email address associated with your Churning Hub account. There is no separate signup and nothing extra to configure. The service runs on Cloudflare Workers and is completely free. To keep it sustainable, alerts are limited to three consolidated emails per account per day, which is more than enough for even the most active churners.
You can turn alerts off at any time from the same panel, or click the unsubscribe link at the bottom of any alert email.
Why This Matters More Than You Think
Let us do some quick math. Say you miss one $300 bank bonus because you forgot a direct deposit requirement. Or you lose a $750 card bonus because you were $200 short on spending when the deadline passed. That is $300 to $750 gone because of a calendar issue, not a financial one.
For couples churning together, the risk doubles. Now you are tracking requirements for two people, and a missed deadline on either side costs real money. Having an automated system watch the dates for you is not a luxury feature. It is basic risk management for anyone who takes churning seriously.
Annual fee reminders matter just as much. Forgetting to downgrade a card before the fee posts means you are paying $95 to $695 for a card you planned to close. Most issuers give you 30 days after the fee posts to cancel for a refund, but not all of them, and why gamble when an email can remind you two weeks early?
Tips for Getting the Most Out of Alerts
Always enter the actual deadline. Take two minutes when you add a new card and read the offer terms for the exact spending window. Enter that date in the requirements deadline field. This one habit makes the whole alert system dramatically more useful.
Set your AF due dates. When you get approved for a card, the annual fee anniversary is roughly one year from the account opening. Set it when you create the entry and forget about it. The alert will find you when it matters.
Use reminder dates for one-off tasks. Not everything fits neatly into the four alert categories. Maybe you want to remember to check if a bonus posted, or call for a retention offer before your anniversary. The personal reminder date field handles anything that does not have its own category.
Check your entries are marked correctly. Spend deadline alerts only fire on entries with a status of "In Progress." If you have already met your spending but forgot to update the status, you might get an unnecessary reminder. Keep your statuses current and the alerts stay relevant.
What is Next
Email alerts are a starting point. We are exploring weekly digest summaries, the ability to snooze individual alerts, and possibly push notifications for mobile users. If you have feedback or feature requests, we genuinely want to hear them.
For now, if you have been tracking bonuses in Churning Hub (or thinking about switching from a spreadsheet), take five minutes to turn on alerts and make sure your deadlines are entered. Future you will appreciate it the first time an email saves you from a missed bonus.
Set Up Your Alerts Now
Free email alerts for every deadline that matters. Takes about two minutes.
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