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The Offer
I’ve received a lot of e-mails from readers asking about a new targeted business card offer they received. It’s for the American Express SimplyCash Plus card and the offer is as follows:
- $300 cash back after $300 in spend
- No annual fee
Card earns at 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 (on up to $50,000 in purchases per year, then 1% on purchases made thereafter)
- 3% cash back on a category of choice from a list of eight categories including (on up to $50,000 per year then 1% thereafter):
- 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
Our Verdict
You can’t apply for this card directly unless you have a targeted offer like this. There is a few things you should keep in mind:
- You can only get the sign up bonus once on every American Express business card now
- Card will officially launch in Spring of 2016 (aka very soon)
- They have sent out other targeted offers of $500 & $1,000 (requires spend of $5,000 & $10,000 respectively)
- Chase Ink Cash (no annual fee) & Chase Ink Plus ($95 annual fee) both earn 5x Chase UR in similar categories
- SimplyCash card usually comes with a bonus of $250
When the card officially launches I suspect the sign up bonus will be $300 after $3,000 in spend. Given that American Express bonuses are now once per lifetime for business cards, I’d wait for a higher targeted bonus or an increased public bonus. They will be trying to compete with the Chase Ink Plus with this card and that currently comes with a ~$600 bonus ($505 after the annual fee, although you can get that waived by applying in branch), so I suspect they will offer increased bonuses on this SimplyCash Plus card on a somewhat regular basis.
Only way I’d be tempted was if I needed more spending power in one of the bonus categories.
