Hacker News Reader

Comment by BobaFloutist | Hacker News Reader

It's, per the article, not really no annual fee, you can't get the card without paying them at least $50 a year for an account with them, where the cash ends up (and then you have to figure out how to extract).

On top of that the article makes the classic mistake of saying it pays for itself if you spend $166 a month, but it only really pays for itself if the marginal value of using the card over a generic 1.5% cashback card on the things you can't get 3% for already is more than $5 a month. Things like high cashback percentages for the first $X a month in specific categories make this intentionally hard to calculate, and are part of why I never really got into optimizing my credit card benefits. It's obnoxiously hard to compare.

View on HN

There are plenty of 2% cards (eg SoFi) and 3% cards for groceries (Capital One Savor). I spend the most on the latter.

If you use Amazon a lot you can get 5% back on that (Chase Amazon).

There are also 5% back for certain categories such as eating out, some time limited (Discover, Chase Freedom).

I wouldn’t count the Amazon card because unless you subscribe to Amazon Prime at $140 a year you can’t get that rate.

I canceled my Prime membership and instantly the reward rate dropped to 3%, which is a pretty crummy store card. Compare to Target as an example - 5% without the pricey subscription.

You have to buy an insane amount of stuff from Amazon/Whole Foods/Fresh to make that product make sense above and beyond other rewards offerings.

I don't disagree, but it's really the other way around, if you have Prime it's worth getting that card and the same for these other special cases, all depending where most of your spending goes.

In general cashback on cards isn't going to save you much money, but it's still nice picking up several hundred dollars worth of cashback over the course of a year.

True, if you have Prime anyway it’s a no-brainer.

There's also Paypal MAstercard which gives you 3% on all purchases using the card through Paypal.

There are no annual fee 2% cards without any hoops. If you don't care about the other perks for Robinhood Gold, the break even would be $50/.01 = $5000 of spend.

Citi DoubleCash is 2% on everything, no hoops, no annual fee.

Yes, that is an example of what parent said exists.

You're right, but man does that take a couple of reads to parse!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence

The fidelity credit card is exactly this if you use Fidelity for your checking account. 2% cashback on everything, goes directly into your bank account.

But the website and app UX for their credit card is awful. Everything is a hassle.

And again, that's $5000 of spend outside of categories you can get better in.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com