Is the Discover It Worth It?
Tl;dr: points and miles enthusiasts will prefer more lucrative cards, but It is a great cash back card with a lucrative first-year bonus.
Amazon Prime Day is starting today, and there are lots of discounts available on tons of products. To really get the most of the savings, you’ll want to use a credit card that offers solid rewards on Amazon purchases. Right now it doesn’t get much more solid than the 5% offered by the no-fee Discover It in the fourth quarter of 2024 (i.e. right now). Discover offers a pre-approval process with no hard credit pull until you submit a full application, and the opportunity to receive an instant card number to use that Amazon bonus right away. So, is It worth considering?
Bonus and earning 💸
The Discover It earns 5% cash back on rotating categories each quarter (up to $1,500 in spending), and 1% on all other spending. You can see the history of these categories here. You have to remember to activate the bonus to earn that 5% back. Thankfully you only have to do this once per quarter, but it’s not retroactive—any spending in the bonus categories before you activate will only earn 1%.
The fourth quarter bonus also includes purchases at Target, and previous bonus categories have included restaurants, gas stations, EV charging, public transportation, Walmart, and grocery stores, among others.
As a bonus, Discover will match all the cash back you earn throughout your first year with the card, with no limit. If you spend the maximum $1,500 each quarter, you would earn a cashback match of $75. If you spent another $2,500 on the card in other categories, that would bring your cash back up to $100.
With our referral code, you can get a $100 statement credit in addition to the cash back match.
Other card benefits
The Discover It is light on perks and protections. It has no foreign transaction fees (although Discover is much less commonly accepted abroad than competitors like Visa), and no late fee after your first late payment. If you want a little more personality in your card, you can choose from multiple designs, or even show off your hockey fandom.
What about the Freedom Flex
You can’t talk about the Discover It without mentioning the Freedom Flex, a card from Chase that offers a similar 5% back on up to $1,500 in spending on a set of rotating categories.
The Freedom Flex does charge foreign transaction fees, but it also offers some pretty powerful benefits that the Discover card doesn’t offer.
These include a $200 welcome bonus after spending $500 in the first three months after card opening, 3% back on dining and drugstores year round, and 5% back on travel booked through Chase. The Freedom Flex earns Ultimate Rewards points that can be redeemed for travel with a bonus or transferred out to valuable travel partners like United and Hyatt if the cardholder also has a Sapphire card. Combined with the Chase Freedom Reserve’s 50% bonus when booking travel through Chase, the Freedom Flex could earn up to 7.5¢ toward travel for each dollar spent. And the Freedom Flex includes impressive protections for a no-fee card, including rental car insurance, purchase protection, extended warranty, and cell phone protection.
This year, there has been a lot of overlap between the cards’ bonus categories, with both cards offering bonuses on restaurants, Amazon, gas, EV charging, and groceries. However, none of these bonus categories have occurred in the same quarter, so someone with both cards could have earned 5% on those categories for half of the year. Last year, the gas and grocery store bonuses were the only bonus categories offered on both cards at the same time.
As for the differences, this year the Freedom Flex has offered bonuses on several categories not offered by the It: hotels, fitness centers and gyms, spas, live entertainment, movie theaters, PayPal, pet stores and veterinarians, and select charities. Bonuses unique to the It card this year are: drug stores, public transit, home improvement, Walmart, and Target stores.
Conclusion
Neither the Discover It nor the Chase Freedom Flex are Lazypoints favorites given the need to monitor cash back calendars, activate the bonuses, and remember which card to use for which type of purchase each quarter. Beyond that, the main downside of these cards is that they eat up wallet space (and 5/24 slots) that could go to other cards with bigger bonuses and stronger perks and earnings. However, for those looking to really maximize their rewards, both cards could be valuable contributors to an overall strategy given their high upside and the ability to hold them indefinitely without any cost.