Best Credit Card for Software and Tech Startups

If you are running a tech startup with high cloud and software expenses, there’s only one card that will give you the most bang for your buck - the American Express Business Gold card.

Even if you are not a tech startup founder, but a content creator or someone who creates digital products (apps, services, etc), look no farther than the Business Gold card.

Overview

Let’s start with the reward structure.

The card has a bunch of 4X categories (see next section). Among those categories, every month, the card gives you 4 points per dollar for your 2 highest spend categories, up to $150,000 every year.

If you max that out, for your $150K spend, you will earn 600,000 Membership Rewards points.

That’s equivalent to somewhere between $6,000 to $18,000 in travel value.

The card also has a few other benefits that I will list out below, but the focus of this blog post will be the 4X multipliers.

$20/month credit after you use the card on Grubhub, FedEx or office supply stores

$12.95/month reimbursement towards Walmart+ membership

No foreign transaction fee

Cell phone protection

Now, let’s focus on the most interesting feature of the card: the 4X bonus categories.

AMEX Business Gold 4X Categories

Here’s a list of all the 4X categories of American Express Business Gold:

Transit

Electronic Goods Retailers or Software and Cloud System Providers

Monthly Wireless Telephone Service

Gas Stations

Restaurants

Advertising on Select Media

As mentioned before, even though it would be amazing to get 4X points on all six of the above categories, the card gives you 4X on your 2 highest spend categories only.

That’s why we will focus on the 2 bonus categories that are unique to tech startup founders or anyone running an online business:

Electronic Goods Retailer or Software and Cloud System Providers

Advertising on Select Media

Let’s start with the first one.

Electronic Goods Retailer or Software and Cloud System Providers

Most tech startups have high monthly expenses with at least one of these vendors:

Amazon AWS

Microsoft Azure

Google Cloud Platform

Salesforce

Adobe

Digital Ocean

Twilio

All these merchants are covered by AMEX Business Gold’s 4X bonus categories. Even if you are not a tech startup founder, but sell digital products that requires cloud deployment, you will still benefit from this category.

Cloud expenditure is typically the largest expense for cloud-hosted software, and this is the only credit card that gives 4% on all that spend up to $150K annually.

Let’s list out a few possible yearly rewards scenarios:

150K/year = $12.5K/month = 600K points ($6K to $18K travel value)

100K/year = $8K/month = 400K points ($4K to $12K travel value)

50K/year = $4k/month = 200K points ($2K to $8K travel value)

25K/year = $2K/month = 100K points ($1K to $4K travel value)

To put the rewards in more concrete terms: With 600K MR points you can fly roundtrip business class from US to Europe a whopping 7 times, while with 100K points you can fly round-trip at least once.

Similarly, if you use the points for hotels instead, with 600K MR points you can get between 10 and 16 free hotel nights.

The upside is unbounded. The examples above apply to someone with very little transfer partner knowledge. If you do a few hours of research, or discuss your options with travel experts, those 600K points can even earn you $40K to $60K travel value. Crazy!

The sheer number of software products and cloud platforms covered by AMEX Business Gold’s 4X bonus categories is very impressive.

However, it doesn’t stop there. The category also applies to retailers selling hardware.

Apple

Best Buy

Dell

Newegg

Microsoft

Most of your employees need laptops. Your office needs a ton of other gadgets (routers, accessories, USB C hubs, etc). You get 4X on all those purchases.

For content creators, this is another niche category. Getting 4X points per dollar spent on tech gadgets (cameras, microphone, drones) is unheard of with any other credit card.

Advertising on Select Media

Marketing spend is inevitable when you are running a business. Especially, buying digital ads.

Some of the most common digital advertising platforms are:

Google Ads

YouTube Ads

Facebook Ads

Instagram Ads

X (Twitter) Ads

Yahoo Ads

Bing Ads

All these are covered by Business Gold’s 4X bonus categories.

If advertisement is one of your highest spend categories, it’s a no-brainer to exclusively use this card to receive the 4X.

Similar to earning 4X on software and cloud purchases, there’s no other card that gives you 4X on online advertising spend.

Quick Thoughts

For most software and tech startups, software/cloud purchases (AWS, GCP, Azure, Salesforce, Adobe, Digital Ocean, Twilio, Best Buy, Dell, Apple etc) and advertising spend (Google Ads, Facebook Ads, etc) are two of their biggest monthly expenses. The American Express Business Gold card covers both these categories at 4X, which is unheard of in the credit card space.