You get the 5% cashback on Amazon.com purchases. That would appear to be the real value-add here, because you would also get that cashback reward using the non-secured and well-established Amazon.com credit card.

You get 5% cashback if you have Amazon prime. Assuming you are a student trying to build your credit, that's $60 a year. That means for the 5% cash back to break even you need to spend $1200 on Amazon per year. That's not obscene, but it doesn't really seem worth it to me unless you use Amazon a lot.

Yep, this is the kicker. They're not highlighting any other form of rewards (such as 2% cash back on everything, or airline miles) so it's not really moving the needle on anything other than the fact that it's Amazon-branded.

I see it as just another ploy to get you to spend more money in the Amazon ecosystem.

Because of Amazon Household [1], you do not necessarily have to hold your own Prime membership to get the 5% back. Being on a Household Prime account is enough to get the full cash back on the regular Amazon credit card, so I'd expect the same would work here. Admittedly their card marketing websites do not make this super clear.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/myh/households

That's assuming you don't use prime for anything else, like free fast shipping, or the TV shows.

I let my Prime subscription expire 6 months ago and I honestly haven't even noticed. The quality of the Amazon experience had already declined so much that I had already stopped using Amazon for most of my shopping/streaming.

2-3 years ago, I was making a purchase on Amazon at least once a month. These days I only use Amazon for price-matching at other stores.

They let their store rot, I dropped prime too a while ago.

It's not a credit card. (It's not Visa, Mastercard, or Amex)

It's just a terminology thing, so not terribly important, but these types of cards are called "store cards" or "retail cards", and they are usually considered to be credit cards, despite having some differences from regular credit cards.

This card seems to allow you carry a balance from one month to the next, so that means it isn't a "charge card" which must be paid in full every month: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charge_card

It's worse than your typical secured credit card because it locks you into Amazon.com and services that use Amazon Pay. Basically, it's an agreement to buy Amazon products or products through Amazon until Amazon determines that your purchasing and payment habits reflect those of a person with good credit.

People saying that it's great because you get 5% back on Amazon purchases are myopic. Nobody on HN would be celebrating the Starbucks Card Credit Builder where you get a 5% discount on purchases and can build credit but can only do so by purchasing products from Starbucks and its affiliates. Why? Because as others have said, there are already plenty of secured Visa/Mastercard cards out there that don't convert your capital to funnybux and lock you in to a particular vendor and its best buddies.

On the other hand, Starbucks really only sells one sort of thing (food) while Amazon sells many things. Furthermore, Starbucks is a luxury, but on Amazon you can, I think, buy many of life's necessities at competitive prices.

I agree that the motive is not necessarily pure. Furthermore I think Amazon is a huge force opposite sustainable economics, and that the American credit system, credit bureaus, and the symbiotic partners who encourage people to take on debt and prey on them in that vulnerable, owned state, are a diabolical construct engineered for social control and a crime against the American people.

But, I think the comparison with Starbucks is not quite right. This is short-sightedly better and long-sightedly worse, for a lot of the same reasons.

You're right that it wasn't a good analogy. More like the Wal-Mart Store Card Credit Builder.

A Wal-Mart Store Card Credit builder that gave 5% cash back would be a great product for a lot of people, and just as worthy of “celebration” as this Amazon card.

I don’t have any problems with store cards in general. I see them as a mutually beneficial agreement between retailers and frequent customers. It allows the retailer to capture a portion of the transaction revenue that would normally go to a third party (and some extra data about the customer), and in return pass on some of the savings to the customer in the form of discounts and rewards.

You need Prime to get the 5%. Prime costs $119/year. You would need to spend $2,380 or nearly $200/mo just to make it worthwhile.

Sorry; that’s not a good product at all.

> You need Prime to get the 5%. Prime costs $119/year.

There are loopholes to this that make Prime much cheaper though.

For example, Prime Student [1] is $6.49/month or $59/year.

The EBT subsidized Prime membership mentioned elsewhere in the thread is $5.99/month (no annual discount).

You can also use Amazon Household [3] on an existing Prime membership to qualify multiple people in the household as Prime members. All members get the 5% benefit, not just the card holder. I doubt this stacks on the student version but it definitely does on vanilla Prime and likely on the subsidized version as well.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Student/b?node=668781011

[2]: https://www.amazon.com/l/16256994011

[3]: https://www.amazon.com/myh/households

> Prime costs $119/year. You would need to spend $2,380 or nearly $200/mo just to make it worthwhile.

This assumes that one won't make use of their Prime benefits.

My last two years living in the US I spent about $3500/year at Amazon. This works out to $175/year cash back, and $105 more than my main credit card would have yielded at 2% cash back. That was enough for me to spend a few minutes applying for and setting up the card, and I was happy with the product.

You factor in the cost of the Prime membership in the break-even calculation, but as someone else noted, that does not count the value of other Prime benefits. I was already a Prime member when the store card was introduced, which means I was valuing those benefits at ~$120/yr on their own.

Different people have different shopping needs/preferences. I have no trouble conceiving of the idea that what might be a good value to me might not be for someone else. In your case, I wonder how you are able to say "Sorry; that’s not a good product at all" with such conviction when there are so many people out there (~100 million) with Prime memberships in the US.

> Basically, it's an agreement to buy Amazon products...

Nothing about this card locks you into buying Amazon brand products that I can tell. Buying Amazon brand products have the same effect as buying non-Amazon brand products on Amazon.

I got the cards and unlike other secured cards it didn't ask for a previous deposit and it gave me a much better balance.

It's secured manually by a deposit, which dictates your credit line. If you don't pay it back, the bank keeps the deposit.

"Normal" cards are not backed by anything.