Amex SimplyCash Plus Card Now Publicly Available – $250 or $500 Signup Bonus

Reposting because 2% extra deal is back again. Thanks to Saverocity for making me aware of this offer coming back.

Last week, Amex publicly launched their new and improved SimplyCash card, called the SimplyCash Plus card. Previously, it had only been available via targeted offers.

Interestingly, the old card is not available for signup at the moment and it’s possible that this new card is meant as a replacement of the old one.

SimplyCash Plus Business Card

Our review of the American Express SimplyCash Plus Business Credit Card 

Card earns the following rates:

• 5% cash back on purchases made in the following categories combined: U.S. office supply stores and on wireless telephone services purchased directly from U.S. service providers; bonus rate is earned on a max of $50,000 in purchases per year
• 3% cash back on one category of your choice from a list of eight categories (on up to $50,000 per year), including:
  • U.S. gas stations
  • U.S. restaurants
  • U.S. purchases for advertising in select media
  • U.S. purchases for shipping
  • Airfare purchased directly from airlines
  • Hotel rooms purchased directly from hotels
  • Car rentals purchased from select car rental companies
  • U.S. computer hardware, software, and cloud computing purchases made directly from select providers
• 1% cash back on all other purchases

The biggest advantage of the new, Plus version of the card is the increased limit on the 5% and 3% categories of $50,000 instead of $25,000 with the old version.

There are two publicly available signup bonus offers on this card:

Signup Bonus Offer #1

Direct Link (if link isn’t working, just find it on americanexpress.com using a cookie-free browser)

This is the offer that’s showing publicly on Americanexpress.com.

• Get 2% extra cashback on all purchases made within the first 6 months
• Max $500 bonus cashback; when spending $25,000, you’ll get the full $500 bonus

The real value of this bonus is for spend in the 5% or 3% categories. With the added 2% bonus, you’ll get 7% and 5% on those categories, and you can – potentially – max out the full $500 value from this bonus.

If you plan on doing $25,000 in everyday spend, you’ll be getting 3% cashback total on the $25k of spend and you’d be better off just using the Signup Bonus Offer #2, below.

Signup Bonus Offer #2

This offer is available through websites with an affiliate relationship with American Express. Support your favorite blogger by using their link or find a link on Google. This offer has an end-date of August 3, 2016; application must be received by that date.

• Get a $250 bonus after spending $5,000 within six months of card approval

Final Thoughts

For someone who will be making $25,000 in bonus category spend (office supply, restaurant, airfare, hotel, etc.) within 6 months, and the spend is currently going on a regular 2% card currently, the $500 bonus is certainly superior. For others, the $250 offer is better.

Personally, I’m not maxing out my INK cards at the moment and I don’t need more 5x bandwidth, so the lure of the card is mainly for the signup bonus. The $500 offer has a challenging spend requirement, and the $250 offer isn’t enough to bait me. If I’d get an offer of $1,000 after $10k in spend, that would be a go for me – some were targeted with such an offer in the past. We’ve also seen targeted offers of $300 after $3k in spend, much better than the current $250 after $5k.

Amex only allows us to get the signup bonus on a card once. Since this is a new version of the SimplyCash card, it should qualify as a new product and we should all be eligible for the bonus, even those who already got the bonus on the non-Plus version of the card. Bear in mind that the SimplyCash Plus card is a credit card, not a charge card, and is thus subject to the (possible) limit of 4 Amex credit cards per person.

It’s worth reading the 20 Things Everybody Should Know About American Express before applying.

If anyone already has the SimplyCash Plus or is getting it soon, check out this offer to get an additional 1% on all purchases. Most likely, they are only targeting non-Plus cardholders, but it can’t hurt to check.