Our Story

Gift Card Guard was founded by Jay Lynch and Steve Polito, two friends and former teammates at Stonehill College.

After racking up a decade of work experience each, they started toying with various app ideas to launch together. They finally decided to take the plunge in 2024 after a fateful discussion about gift cards. During that chat, they realized a few things:

• They each had more than $200 in unspent gift cards
• They had to think surprisingly hard to recall all of them
• Half of their gift cards were buried in email, and the other half were buried in junk drawers
• They weren't sure of the balances on any of them
• They'd both forgotten or misplaced gift cards in the past

They started researching the issue and found they weren't alone.

According to consumer reports, nearly 50% of American adults have unspent gift cards with an average total value of $187 per person. That amounts to $20+ billion in unspent gift cards in the US, with much of that value going to waste.

They started searching for an app that could solve their problem. A few came close, but nothing quite did the trick. So they built Gift Card Guard.

Hope you like it!