If you participate in travel hacking, collect frequent flyer miles, or juggle multiple hotel loyalty and credit card reward programs, you know how quickly tracking balances across family members can become a headache. For years, the default answer in the award travel community was AwardWallet. But as loyalty programs have evolved, so have the frustrations with cloud-based aggregators. Between annual subscription costs ($30+/year for AwardWallet Plus), feature paywalls, and recurring security concerns over storing master passwords in the cloud, many travelers find themselves searching for a modern, free alternative to AwardWallet.
To solve this problem, I built and open-sourced Award Tracker—a secure, private, and 100% local reward portfolio management tool that runs directly on your computer.
In this post, I will walk through why cloud-based aggregators fall short for privacy-conscious award travelers, how Award Tracker takes a zero-knowledge local approach, and how you can use it to track all your airline miles, hotel points, and credit card rewards for free.
Why Travelers Are Looking for an AwardWallet Alternative
AwardWallet has been around for a long time, but cloud-hosted aggregators suffer from fundamental architectural problems that leave many users uncomfortable:
1. Centralized Credential Storage and Breach Risks
To track your balances automatically, cloud aggregators require you to enter your usernames and passwords for every airline, hotel, and banking portal on their central servers. That creates a massive honeypot. If the aggregator suffers a data breach, every single loyalty account, personal identifier, and linked financial profile is exposed.
For anyone who values online privacy and digital security, handing master passwords to a third-party cloud service is an unnecessary gamble.
2. Airline Account Suspensions and Bot Blocking
Airlines like Delta, United, and American actively monitor and block automated logins originating from known cloud datacenter IP addresses (such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud). When a cloud service attempts to log into your account from a remote server, airlines often flag the session as suspicious activity. In the worst cases, accounts have been locked or audited simply for using a cloud aggregator.
3. Subscription Fatigue and Feature Paywalls
AwardWallet locks critical features behind its paid AwardWallet Plus subscription. If you want comprehensive expiration date tracking, historical property updates, or unlimited parallel tracking for family members, you have to pay an ongoing yearly fee. Many travelers on forums like Reddit r/awardtravel and r/selfhosted end up giving up on aggregators entirely and reverting to tedious manual spreadsheets.
Introducing Award Tracker: 100% Free, Local, and Zero-Knowledge
Award Tracker was built from the ground up to solve these pain points. It is free, open source under the Apache 2.0 license, and runs entirely on your local machine as a background tray application.
Here is what makes Award Tracker different:
Zero-Knowledge Local Encryption
Award Tracker never uploads your credentials anywhere. All passwords, account identifiers, and loyalty numbers are stored locally inside an encrypted SQLite database on your machine.
- AES-256 Fernet Encryption: Your credentials are encrypted at rest using industry-standard symmetric cryptography.
- Master Password Key: The encryption key is derived directly from a master password that only you know.
- No Cloud Backups or Telemetry: There is no remote database, no tracking, and no external password recovery. You retain 100% sovereignty over your data.
Local Browser Automation from Your Residential IP
Instead of querying airlines from remote server farms, Award Tracker runs local SeleniumBase automation directly on your computer. The traffic originates from your home residential internet connection, using standard browser fingerprints. To airline and hotel security systems, it looks identical to normal manual browsing, drastically reducing the risk of security lockouts.
Guided Interactive Sign-In (4-Step Overlay)
The hardest part of reward tracking today is dealing with multi-factor authentication (MFA/2FA), SMS verification codes, and Captchas. Cloud scrapers either fail completely or send disruptive push alerts.
Award Tracker solves this with a Guided Interactive Sign-in Overlay:
- When a program requires MFA or a captcha, Award Tracker opens a headed browser window.
- It automatically pre-fills your username and password for you.
- A floating guide overlay walks you through the steps: you simply solve the captcha or enter the SMS code yourself.
- Once authenticated, Award Tracker takes back control, automatically navigates to your mileage summary, records your balances, and closes the browser window.
Key Features
Beyond security and privacy, Award Tracker is packed with features designed specifically for award travelers:
1. Family and Multi-Person Management
Managing points for a spouse, children, or family members is seamless. You can group and filter your portfolio in one click:
- By Category: View separate tallies for Airlines, Hotels, Credit Cards, and Car Rentals.
- By Owner / Person: Assign custom color-coded badges to each family member (e.g. Self, Spouse, Child) to see who holds which points.
- By Program: Compare multiple accounts within the same loyalty program side by side.
2. Historical Balance Tracking and USD Valuations
Award Tracker does not just show your current balance; it records historical snapshots so you can see how your points portfolio grows over time. It also calculates estimated USD valuations based on standard points valuations, giving you a clear picture of your total travel net worth.
3. Expiration Warnings and Desktop Notifications
Never let hard-earned miles expire silently. Award Tracker highlights accounts with impending expiration dates in prominent rose badges on your dashboard. When run as a background service, it dispatches native desktop notifications (Windows Action Center, macOS Notification Center, or Linux notify-send) whenever points are near expiry or when sync operations finish.
4. Automatic Daily Backups
Your encrypted SQLite database (awardtracker.db) is automatically backed up every day at 3:00 AM (or on startup if the previous day was missed). You can configure backup retention for 3, 7, or 30 days right from the Settings menu.
5. Automated Voucher and Certificate Scraping
Points are only half the battle—free night certificates, companion passes, and lounge access vouchers expire quickly if forgotten. Award Tracker includes built-in recognition for:
- Korean Air SKYPASS: Automatic Mileage Validity Batch scraping and upgrade certificate tracking.
- United Airlines MileagePlus: Automatic United Club One-time pass certificate recognition.
Supported Loyalty Programs
Award Tracker supports automated scraping and manual tracking for dozens of major travel and reward programs:
Airlines
- Air Canada (Aeroplan)
- Alaska Airlines (Mileage Plan)
- All Nippon Airways (ANA Mileage Club)
- American Airlines (AAdvantage)
- Asiana Airlines (Asiana Club)
- Avianca (LifeMiles)
- British Airways (Avios)
- Delta Air Lines (SkyMiles)
- EVA Air (Infinity Mileagelands)
- Japan Airlines (JAL Mileage Bank)
- JetBlue (TrueBlue)
- Korean Air (SKYPASS)
- Southwest Airlines (Rapid Rewards)
- United Airlines (MileagePlus)
- Virgin Atlantic (Flying Club)
Hotels
- Caesars Rewards
- Hilton Honors
- IHG One Rewards
- Marriott Bonvoy
- World of Hyatt
Credit Cards & Manual Programs
- American Express Membership Rewards
- Bilt Rewards
- Capital One Miles
- Chase Ultimate Rewards
- Citi ThankYou Rewards
- Wells Fargo Rewards
- Any custom manual program or retail loyalty card
Car Rentals
- Avis Preferred
- Hertz Gold+ Rewards
How to Get Started
Award Tracker is 100% free and open source. You can find the source code, installation instructions, and release details on GitHub:
GitHub Repository: shyoo/awardtracker
Quick Setup for Developers
- Clone the repository: git clone https://github.com/shyoo/awardtracker.git
- Create and activate a Python virtual environment (Python 3.14+ recommended).
- Install dependencies: pip install -r requirements.txt
- Run the application: python run.py
- Set your master password and start adding your loyalty accounts!
Summary
If you have been looking for an AwardWallet alternative that is genuinely free, respects your privacy, and avoids cloud security hazards, give Award Tracker a try.
Contributions, feature requests, and community scrapers are warmly welcomed on the GitHub repository. If you find the project useful, please consider starring it on GitHub!
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