Should You Apply For The Targeted $300 American Express SimplyCash Plus Offer?

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.