American Express SimplyCash Plus Business Card: $500 Bonus With Lower Minimum Spend Required

The Offer

No direct link that isn’t an affiliate link. If you’re interested in this offer then check out another blog that uses credit card affiliate links.

• Earn a bonus of up to $500 on the American Express SimplyCash Plus business credit card. Bonus is broken down as follows:
  • Earn a $250 statement credit after you spend $5,000 in qualifying purchases within the first six months
  • Earn an additional $250 statement credit after you spend an additional $10,000 or more in qualifying purchases within the first year of card membership

Card Details

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. This card also have no annual fee.

This offer is valid until January 25th, 2016.

Our Verdict

Previously their has been two offers on this card:

• $500 after $25,000 in spend within first six months
• $250 after $5,000 in spend within the first six months

This new offer is better than both of those because it’s for the full $500 for only $15,000 spend and also allows you to just pick up $250 for $5,000 in spend. That being said, we’ve seen massive targeted offers for a $1,000 bonus as well. Should you take this deal and run? $500 is certainly attractive, just keep the $15,000 total spend in mind, the good thing is that this card earns 5% cash back on useful categories so there is less opportunity costs involved that other big spend cards (e.g American Express Business Platinum 100,000 point offer). Most people would still prefer the Chase Ink Plus or Chase Ink Cash, as those cards earn 5x Chase UR points that have a minimum value 1¢ per point.

You can also only get the sign up bonus once per lifetime with American Express (unless you get a targeted offer without that restriction in the fine print), I’m not sure if a better offer will come along or not. If you can’t reach the full spend on this card, I’d personally wait. If you can then it’s a great offer, so I’d probably sign up. At the same now that I’ve said that, I’m sure another better offer will come along and I’ll look like a fool!

Before applying for this card or asking questions, make sure you make yourself familiar with these 21 things everybody should know about American Express credit cards.

Hat tip to Frequent Miler