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.
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.
